US President Barack Obama on Tuesday led calls for Turkey and Russia to end their dispute over the downing of a Russian fighter jet and focus instead on the real enemy — Islamic State militants.
It came as Obama’s Pentagon chief said the US would increasingly rely on special operations forces to battle Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, where the extremists have seized huge swathes of territory including oil fields used to fund their activities.
The US president said he was sure that Russia would soon change tack in Syria and back a political solution to the bloody conflict after years of supporting long-time ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who Washington insists must step down.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged Turkey and Russia to find a way to avoid a repeat of the jet incident, which threatens to end efforts to forge a common anti-Islamic State front in the wake of attacks in Paris claimed by the group that left 130 dead.
Obama was frank about what both sides should do.
“I want to be very clear: Turkey is a NATO ally. The US supports Turkish rights to defend itself and its airspace and its territory,” Obama said after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Paris.
“We all have a common enemy and that is ISIL [Islamic State], and I want to make sure we focus on that threat,” Obama said.
Erdogan, who has demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin provide evidence to back up charges Ankara trades in oil with the Islamic State, said he too was keen to move on.
Stoltenberg, speaking at the start of a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, said the focus should be on “how we can de-escalate and calm tensions [and find] mechanisms so that we can avoid the type of incident we saw last week.”
The Turkish Air Force shot down the Russian jet last week for allegedly violating its airspace near the Syrian border.
Ministers at the NATO meeting are to review measures adopted by the alliance after the Ukraine crisis to upgrade readiness levels and reassure nervous members in Eastern Europe once ruled from Moscow that the alliance will stand by them.
Stoltenberg said the changes apply globally in what he described as a “dark” security environment, with concerns over Syria looming large.
Obama, who took a conciliatory tone in a meeting on Monday with Putin, on Tuesday said he believed Moscow would soon realize that the cost of its military intervention in support of al-Assad outweighed the benefits.
“Ultimately, Russia’s going to recognize the threat that [the Islamic State] poses to the country, to its people, is the most significant and that they need to align themselves with us who are fighting ISIL,” Obama said.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced Washington would deploy a special expeditionary force to Iraq — and hinted more forces could be sent to Syria — after more than a year of US-led coalition air strikes on the extremists.
“The international community — including our allies and partners — has to step up before another attack like Paris,” he said.
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