U.S. offers Ankara technologies to help secure Syria frontier

PanARMENIAN.Net - The United States is accelerating efforts to help Turkey clamp down on its border with Syria, senior U.S. officials said, and for the first time will offer technologies to Ankara to help it secure the frontier, Reuters reports.

Washington and Ankara have been discussing for months how to seal the last piece of unsecured border, a 98-kilometer-long stretch that has served as a thruway for Islamic State fighters, black-market goods and war materiel.

Islamic State controls the Syrian side of the border, and the effort to secure it assumed new urgency after November's deadly Paris attacks. Some of the Paris attackers used or attempted to use the Syria-Turkey border to travel between Islamic State-held territory and Europe, the officials said.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is due to arrive in Turkey on Thursday, January 21 and will meet with President Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the fight against Islamic State.

Biden's visit to Istanbul is the latest in a string of high-level visits to the NATO ally. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in February will lead an inter-agency delegation and offer the Turkish government a menu of specific border-control technologies, the U.S. officials told Reuters.

Aerostat surveillance balloons and anti-tunneling technology are on the U.S. menu of equipment likely on offer, and the U.S. is prepared to share methods for detecting the material used in improvised explosive devices, the officials said.

"We like what we’re seeing in terms of their actions and we want to work with them to tighten the screws a little bit further," a senior administration official said of Turkey. He and others requested anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations.

Turkish steps to secure the border include the deployment of 25,000 more regular army troops and the installation of concrete barriers and fences.