Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Ankara-backed militants will advance toward the northern Syrian town of Manbij in Aleppo province after they accomplish their mission in al-Bab city in the same province. Meanwhile, Syria has strongly denounced Ankara’s attacks near al-Bab.

Ankara seeks “to absorb northern Syria into the greater Turkey,” because the Turkish authorities want to take possession of Syrian water and oil resources, says Richard Hayden Black, a Republican member of the Virginia state Senate.

Turkey uses terrorist groups like Daesh and al-Qaeda to carry out ethnic cleansing in northern Syria and pave the ground for Ankara's dominance there, the senator told Press TV on Tuesday.

According to Hayden Black, “The group ISIS (Daesh) is sort of a tool of Turkey, of the United States, [and] of all of these groups (US allies). They don’t want [Syria] to eventually survive, because Erdogan sees himself as the head of a vast caliphate, [and] as [the head of] a resurgent Ottoman Empire that stretches from Europe onto China.”

“Turkey has been the greatest ally of the ISIS (Daesh) throughout most of the six-year war” in Syria, he said, adding that Daesh had 2,000 oil tankers, which carried massive amounts of oil stolen from Syria and took it to Turkey.

Back in August, Turkish Special Forces, tanks and jets, backed by planes from the US-led coalition, launched their first coordinated offensive in Syria in an alleged bid to battle terror groups such as Daesh and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a US-backed Kurdish group based in Syria.

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