Daily Times

ANKARA: The Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said that Ankara would cooperate with any country in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group, including Russia, but stressed that he did not intend to offer Incirlik airbase for use by the Russian Air Force, Russia Today reported.

Earlier on Monday, news agencies cited Cavusoglu as telling the national TV channel TRT that Ankara would co-operate with “everybody who is fighting IS.” He said, “Ankara has opened the Incirlik airbase to all those wishing to join the active fight. Why not cooperate with Russia in the same manner?”

However, several hours later Cavusoglu denied mentioning Russia’s possible presence at Incirlik. “I did not make such a comment. We said that we could cooperate with everyone in the fight against ISIS. We said that we could cooperate with Russia in the period ahead in the fight against IS. I did not make any comment referring to Russian planes coming to the Incirlik airbase,” Cavusoglu said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian and Turkish special services have yet to revive the channels for sharing information between their intelligence agencies, which have been inactive for some time. He added that the time has come for them to be “reloaded” and made fully-functional again.

Peskov made the point that to his knowledge, the Russian and Turkish militaries have not yet resumed official communication.

Commenting on the allegations that Russian citizens could have been involved in performing the terror acts that struck Istanbul’s international airport last week, he said that this serves as yet more proof of how important the contact between the security services is, and also shows that the information they exchange must be reacted to in the proper way.

Peskov added that the Russian security services informed their European counterparts about those who were now suspected of staging the terror attacks in Turkey, and that the suspects had visited a number of European states, as well as Turkey.

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