Sep 25, 2016

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey could join a US-led operation in Syria to retake the Islamic State group's stronghold of Raqa only if Kurdish fighters are not involved, a newspaper reported Sunday.

US support for Kurdish forces in Syria is a sore point for Ankara, which considers such fighters to be "terrorists" linked to the Kurdish rebels waging a bloody insurgency across the border in southeast Turkey.

Washington, however, sees the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its People's Protection Units (YPG) militia as the best forces fighting IS jihadists on the ground in Syria.

Erdogan said that if the US conducted its Raqa operation with Syrian Kurdish forces, Turkey would "not have any place" in the offensive.

"If they do not insert the PYD and YPG into this business, then certainly, we can get (involved) with the US in this fight," he told reporters on the plane back from this week's UN General Assembly in New York, quoted in the Hurriyet daily.