Turkey’s chief of general staff and his U.S. counterpart discussed a safe zone in Syria along Turkey\u2019s border on the sidelines of a NATO conference in Slovenia, the Turkish Defense Ministry said Saturday.<\/p>\n
Yasar Guler and Joseph Dunford held a bilateral meeting in capital Ljubljana where a two-day NATO Military Committee Conference is being held until Sept. 15, the ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The Turkish military chief shared Turkey’s expectations about the safe zone east of Euphrates in Syria, a recent hot topic between the U.S. and Turkey.<\/p>\n
Ankara attaches importance to the safe zone in terms of its fight against YPG\/PKK terror groups.<\/p>\n
On Aug. 7, Turkish and U.S. military officials agreed to set up a safe zone in northern Syria and develop a peace corridor to facilitate the movement of displaced Syrians who want to return home. They also agreed to establish a joint operations center.<\/p>\n
The agreement also envisaged setting up necessary security measures to address Turkey’s security concerns, including clearing the zone of the terrorist YPG\/PKK, a group the U.S. has sometimes been allied with, despite Turkey\u2019s objections.<\/p>\n
In its more than 30-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK — listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU — has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, including women and children. The YPG is the group’s Syrian branch.<\/p>\n
Guler and Dunford also discussed some NATO security issues, the ministry added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yasar Guler and Joseph Dunford hold bilateral meeting on sidelines of NATO conference in Slovenia. Turkey’s chief of general staff and his U.S. counterpart discussed a safe zone in Syria along Turkey\u2019s border on the sidelines of a NATO conference in Slovenia, the Turkish Defense Ministry said Saturday. Yasar Guler and Joseph Dunford held a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,17,1,118,37,103,101,174,194,173],"tags":[9002,9120,6022,78353],"class_list":["post-64209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-europe","category-general","category-hot","category-middle-east","category-only-on-nationalturk","category-politics","category-turkey-daily","category-turkey-general","category-turkey-headlines","tag-syria","tag-turkish","tag-us","tag-yasar-guler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}