French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday accused Turkish forces of sometimes working with militants linked to the ISIL terrorist group in its operation in northern Syria.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I look at Turkey, they now are fighting against those who fought with us. And sometimes they work with ISIS proxies,\u201d Macron said at a London news conference with US President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Macron, who will meet Turkey\u2019s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later in the day ahead of a NATO summit, also said he stood by comments he made last month that NATO is strategically \u201cbrain dead\u201d.<\/p>\n
Macron insisted there must be no \u201cambiguity\u201d toward ISIL, saying that Turkey\u2019s actions against the Kurdish militias that helped the allies fight the Takfiri group showed the need for better coordination.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have lost cooperation with Turkey, on security and trade and migration and European Union and France,\u201d Macron said, adding that two clarifications must be made at the summit.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is it possible to be a member of the alliance, to work with \u2014 to be integrated and buy things from Russia?\u201d he asked, referring to Ankara\u2019s purchase of Russia\u2019s S-400 missile system.<\/p>\n
And secondly, he said it would have to be asked whether Turkey wants to remain a member of NATO if Erdogan makes good on a threat to delay Baltic defense measures unless allies declare the Kurdish militia terrorists.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, Macron called for in-depth talks with Russia.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to have a strategic dialogue with Russia,\u201d he said, but warned that the alliance should do so \u201cwith its eyes wide open\u201d.<\/p>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin had earlier indicated that Moscow was open to cooperation with NATO on common threats, including international terrorism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday accused Turkish forces of sometimes working with militants linked to the ISIL terrorist group in its operation in northern Syria. \u201cWhen I look at Turkey, they now are fighting against those who fought with us. And sometimes they work with ISIS proxies,\u201d Macron said at a London news conference …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":17679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17680,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17678\/revisions\/17680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}