The United States is accelerating efforts to help Turkey clamp down on its border with Syria, senior US officials said, and for the first time will offer technologies to Ankara to help it secure the frontier.
Washington and Ankara have been discussing for months how to seal the last piece of unsecured border, a 98-kilometer-long (60 mile-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.