ISTANBUL — Turkish warplanes struck seven Islamic State targets north of Aleppo, Syria, in the first Turkish contribution to a U.S. led coalition to weaken the Islamic militant group’s grasp on much of eastern Syria, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
“Our jets started last night to carry out air operations with coalition forces against ISIS targets in Syria which pose a threat to our security too,” the ministry said Saturday.
Turkish officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the strikes came in two groups. Overnight Friday, two planes struck three targets. Saturday, another two planes struck four targets in the vicinity of northern Aleppo, where Islamic State has been threatening areas held by moderate rebel forces controlling the border crossing that connects Turkey to Aleppo, including the key border city of Azaz.
The United States and Turkey have been trying to agree over the past few weeks on the scope of Turkey’s participation in a multinational coalition that has been bombing Islamic State in Syria and Iraq for over a year. The weekend’s strikes appear to suggest that an agreement had been reached.
On Aug. 24, both countries announced that they had completed an “air tasking agreement” to allow coordination between the various countries involved with striking militant targets.
Turkey struck a small number of ISIS targets on July 24, apparently independently of the coalition, followed by attacks on the militant Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, mostly in the northern Iraq mountains around Qandil where the group is based.
Turkey had expressed reluctance in the past to directly confront Islamic State because of the success by PKK-linked militants in Syria in battling the group along the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkish officials have repeatedly described the PKK, which fought a decades-long insurgency against Turkey that appears on the verge of resuming, and Islamic State as equal threats to Turkish security.
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