WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th February, 2019) US Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Hale and Turkish Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sedat Onal during a bilateral meeting in Washington, DC discussed further cooperation on Syrian, the Department of State said in a press release.
"Following a plenary meeting, senior US and Turkish officials met in working group formats to discuss bilateral cooperation on Syria; counterterrorism; defense matters; and judicial and consular issues," the release said on Tuesday.
Hale and Onal also launched working groups on bilateral and regional affairs, the release added. Both sides reaffirmed the strategic importance of the bilateral relationship and committed to addressing shared concerns as allies.
In December, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Ankara was ready to launch a military operation against Kurdish fighters on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River as well as in Syria's Manbij, if the United States did not remove the Kurdish militia from there.
He later said that he had decided to postpone the start of the military operation in Syria after a phone conversation with US President Donald Trump on December 14, during which Trump revealed his plans to withdraw troops from Syria.
On January 15, Erdogan said, following a phone conversation with Trump, that the latter had proposed creating a 30-kilometer (18-mile) buffer zone in Syria. The Turkish leader recalled that he had come with a similar initiative as far back as when Barack Obama was president, but the proposal never came to pass. According to Erdogan, the future security zone will be controlled by the country's military.
