Turkey opposes US plan to arm Kurdish fighters battling ISIL in Syria

Turkey has said that a US plan to arm Kurdish fighters in Syria, which it alleges are linked to what it considers a “terrorist” organisation is unacceptable.

The US has been supporting a coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as it prepares an assault on ISIL’s self-declared capital Raqqa.

The SDF is led by the Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), a group Turkey sees as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought the state in the southeast of Turkey since 1984 and is considered a “terrorist group” by the US and EU.

Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford reports from Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border.

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