US to help Turkey block IS at border

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 through way for Islamic State (IS) fighters, blackmarket goods and war materiel. IS 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 Stateheld territory and Europe, the officials said. 

US Vice President Joe Biden’s Turkey visit and his meet with President Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will focus on defeating the Islamic State. In February US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson will lead an interagency delegation to Turkey and offer its government a menu of specific border-control technologies, US officials said. Aerostat surveillance balloons and anti-tunnelling 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. 

U.S.-Turkish discussions have been complicated by competing priorities. Turkey is focused on containing Kurdish separatists and the United States has the stated aim of destroying Islamic State militants who control areas of Syria and Iraq. 

Those talks “gained new urgency” after Islamic Statedirected shootings and bombings that killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13, a second senior administration official said.