Turkey and US agree to mend ties over Syria

The US and Turkey have reached an agreement to defuse the crisis in northern Syria, with Turkey proposing a joint deployment in the region if a US-backed Kurdish militia leaves a border area.

Turkey had threatened to attack US-allied Kurdish forces in Manbij, regarding them as terrorists, the BBC reports. Pro-Turkish forces are battling the militia in nearby Afrin, across Turkey’s southern border with Syria.

The US has “armed, trained and aided Kurdish fighters with air support and special forces, as the main ground force in its campaign against Islamic State,” says Reuters.

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But the Turkish government views the Kurdish fighters as an “extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought a decades-long war against Ankara,” says Al-Jazeera.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan during a two-day visit that followed weeks of escalating anti-American rhetoric from the Turkish government.

“We’re going to act together from this point forward. We’re going to lock arms. We’re going to work through the issues that are causing difficulties for us and we’re going to resolve them,” Tillerson told a news conference after a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.