ANKARA,— Turkey’s parliament voted late on Thursday to extend by a year a mandate authorizing the deployment of troops to Syria and Iraq, weeks after it stepped up its role in the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State.
The NATO member opened its air bases to coalition fighter jets in July and has since taken part in joint strikes for the first time on the radical Sunni militant group in northern Syria, ending years of reluctance to take a front-line role.
While it has the second-largest military land force in NATO, Turkey has repeatedly made clear it does not intend to send ground troops into Syria unless provoked by a clear threat to its national security.
It has been working with Washington on plans to flush Islamic State out of a strip of territory on the Syrian side of the border by jointly providing air cover for U.S.-trained Syrian rebel fighters on the ground.
Also in July, Turkey launched air strikes on Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) camps in Iraqi Kurdistan in response to what it said was an escalation in attacks on its security forces by the Kurdish militant group.
The parliamentary motion had been widely expected to pass despite resistance from the pro-Kurdish opposition.
The PKK is fighting the Turkish state with the aim of establish an autonomous Kurdish region and more cultural rights for ethnic Kurds,who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 75-million population but have long been denied basic political and cultural rights, its goal to political autonomy. A large Turkey’s Kurdish community openly sympathise with PKK rebels.
In March 2013, its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan called a ceasefire. But violence has resumed after a suicide bombing blamed on Islamic State killed 32 pro-Kurdish activists in July 2015 in the Kurdish town of Suruc in Turkish Kurdistan in the southeast of the country.
Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, Reuters | Ekurd.net
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