US, Turkey make little headway
ANKARA, Turkey — About the only thing the top diplomats from the United States and Turkey could agree upon Friday was that their countries’ relations had reached a crisis point, as the two sides delayed negotiations until next month on issues that at times have brought the two NATO allies close to confrontation on the battlefield.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson dined for three hours Thursday night with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and diplomats from both countries labored into the early hours of Friday morning in hopes of announcing at least a few specific measures. But the joint statement issued Friday contained only affirmations of respect and a promise to keep talking.
Gradually worsening for years, relations between the United States and Turkey reached a new low in recent weeks as Turkey launched an offensive into western Syria to dislodge Kurdish forces there. While the Kurds have provided the bulk of the ground troops for the U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State militant group, Turkey considers them violent separatists.
Tillerson vowed after the meeting that the two countries will work together in the fight against the Islamic State.
‘‘We’re not going to act alone any longer. We’re not going to be the U.S. doing one thing and Turkey doing another,’’ Tillerson said. ‘‘We’re going to act together from this point forward.”
But while the war in Syria is perhaps the most pressing of the disagreements between the two countries, it is by no means the only one.
The Trump administration also has been perturbed by Erdogan’s creeping authoritarianism, his increasingly cozy relations with Moscow, his security detail’s brazen attack in Washington on peaceful protesters and Turkey’s arrests of Americans and State Department employees.
The Turks are furious at the administration’s refusal to extradite Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of orchestrating a 2016 coup from his self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.
Turkey has now jailed more than 50,000 people and suspended over 140,000 from their jobs since the attempted coup.
Friday, a Turkish court condemned six Turkish journalists to life in prison for undermining the constitutional order. Another court release a Turkish-German journalist, Deniz Yucel, but in doing so indicted him on charges of spreading terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred, which risk up to 18 years in prison.