SURUC, Turkey - No American ally is closer to the threat of the Islamic State than Turkey, and no country could play a more important role in a coalition that President Obama is assembling to combat the extremist Sunni militants. Yet Turkey has been reluctant to enlist, in part because of the desperate conflict playing out on its border with Syria.
On Saturday, outgunned Kurdish fighters, just a few hundred yards inside Syria and clearly visible from hilltop olive groves in this frontier village, battled Islamic State militants advancing from a village less than a mile away. They fought with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns within sight of Kobani, the central town in a besieged Kurdish area of Syria that has been falling village by village to a weeklong onslaught by the Islamic State.
Turkish soldiers in armored vehicles stood by at the border fence, taking no action except to block Turkish and Syrian Kurds from crossing into Syria to defend Kobani, where Kurds fear a massacre. That has fed the fury of Kurds on both sides of the border, who accuse Turkey, with its long history of conflict with Kurdish separatists, of tacitly supporting the Islamic State against them.
It is a violent, murky situation. The chaos on the border, and Turkey's ambivalent reaction, - it has accepted nearly 150,000 refugees, mostly Kurdish, from Kobani in the last week - is a reflection of Turkey's complex interests in the Syrian civil war raging to its south.
Turkey is caught between conflicting interests: Defeating Islamic militants across its border while not enhancing the power of Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. Mr. Obama wants Turkey to stop the flow of foreign fighters traveling through the country to join the Islamic State. As a NATO ally, Turkey could also take part in military operations and provide bases from which to carry out airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
Turkish leaders have condemned the brutality of the Islamic State, but they worry that the American-led campaign against the militants will strengthen the Syrian Kurds, whose fighters maintain ties to Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Adding to that pressure is the fact that the United States is allied with Kurds in Iraq. A Turkish political analyst said Saturday that the scenes at the border raised the possibility that Turkey sees the Kurds, and the semiautonomous zone they have carved out around Kobani during three years of civil war in Syria, as 'a greater threat' than the Islamic State, which has seized parts of Iraq and Syria, imposing harsh rule in areas under its control.
Those competing priorities, said the analyst, Soli Ozel, a columnist for the Turkish newspaper Haberturk and a lecturer at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, were likely among the remaining 'sticking points' with the United States.
'Turkey will do something militarily,' he said, citing a proposal by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reported Saturday, to use Turkish ground forces to set up a secure zone inside Syria. but one of Turkey's goals, Mr. Ozel said, might be 'to crush or dissolve the Syrian Kurdish autonomous zone.'
After intense lobbying by the Obama administration at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Turkey finally appears ready to take a more active role in the fight. Mr. Erdogan, who met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday, returned home to declare that Turkey would no longer be a bystander. 'Our religion does not allow the killing of innocent people,' he said.
But the recruitment has been arduous, and Turkey's military role is likely to be constrained by its complex interests in Syria. In comments published Saturday in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, Mr. Erdogan said Turkey would defend its frontier if necessary, pending authorization of military action outside the border expected at a special meeting of the Turkish Parliament on Thursday.
He said setting up the secure zone inside Syria would require international agreement, and that one goal would be the return of more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees who have placed a severe burden on Turkey.
'This is not just about Turkey,' he said. 'This is about returning 1.5 million people to their homes.'
In a statement, the Obama administration said Mr. Biden and Mr. Erdogan had discussed 'the urgent need to build a broad-based coalition to defeat ISIL through a variety of means, including military actions.'
Mr. Obama, who gained backing for the coalition from the British Parliament on Friday, did not meet Mr. Erdogan in New York. But on his way back to Washington on Thursday, Mr. Obama called him from Air Force One to thank Turkey for taking care of 'the massive influx of refugees flowing into Turkey, including tens of thousands this week alone.'
Turkey was initially reluctant to take an openly aggressive stance toward the Islamic State, because the militants had taken 49 Turkish citizens hostage in the Iraqi city of Mosul. On Sept. 20, Turkey obtained the release of the hostages in a covert intelligence operation. The circumstances of the release were murky - there were reports that Turkey had swapped prisoners for the hostages - but the return of the Turkish captives nevertheless stirred hopes that Turkey would feel less constrained in acting against the group.
Turkey's most immediate concern, however, is the rise of tensions on its border. While the United States and its Arab allies continue to carry out airstrikes in eastern Syria, there have been no strikes around Kobani, a collection of mostly Kurdish farming villages, also known as Ayn al-Arab. Kurdish fighters have issued urgent calls for help, saying they had only light weapons and were struggling to hold off the extremists, whose fighters are armed with tanks and artillery.
Kurds on both sides of the border are angry that the United States has not protected Kobani, especially since an assault on Kurds from the minority Yazidi religious sect in Sinjar, Iraq, last month triggered the first American airstrikes against the Islamic State. Some Kurds suspect that the United States is ignoring the fighting in Kobani to mollify Turkey.
Several male residents of Kobani said in recent days that they had brought their families to safety in Turkey and planned to head back to fight. Some, presenting themselves as civilians, were allowed into Turkey after checks at a border post.
'If they need to locate them, I can insert a smart chip in my heart and go to the Islamic State fighters,' said Hajjar Sheikh Mohammad, 22, a Syrian Kurd trying to return to Syria to fight, suggesting that he would sacrifice himself to spot Islamic State targets.
On Friday, as the Islamic State fighters came closer, large crowds gathered on both sides of the border fence and broke it down. Hundreds of people streamed across. Entering Turkey were women, children and older men, one leading a cow. Entering Syria were hundreds of men, some carrying backpacks, one riding a motorcycle.
At first, the police and army forces withdrew, and the atmosphere was almost jovial, with people singing and standing on the fence. But then security forces returned, firing tear-gas canisters. A crowd of perhaps 1,000 people scattered in panic, and the security forces continued firing tear gas as the crowd fled on foot and in cars.
On Saturday, Syrian and Turkish Kurds cheered from hilltops dotted with fig and olive trees and army foxholes as Kurdish fighters scaled a ridge and fired a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. Muzzle flashes could be seen as Islamic State fighters returned fire and zipped toward the front line in cars and on motorcycles.
A Kurdish activist, Mustafa Ebdi, said from Kobani that an Islamic State command post, a tank and a cannon had been hit by an American strike, but there was no immediate confirmation from the United States, and similar reports have proved false in recent days.
Complicating the geopolitical issues is the fact that the Kurdish militants defending Kobani, the People's Protection Units, are linked to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or P.K.K., the Turkey-based Kurdish militia that Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist group.
But the Kurdish militants in Kobani and Afrin further west have been among the more effective groups in Syria at carving out safe areas where Christians and Muslims have lived in relative safety and harmony.
That is what troubles Turkey, Mr. Ozel, the analyst, said. When Mr. Erdogan calls for 'a buffer zone,' Mr. Ozel said, he could mean the Syrian Kurdish autonomous area, with Turkey 'not only taking control, but changing the demographics' by resettling the overwhelmingly Arab Syrian refugees there.
Mr. Obama's top military adviser, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, has suggested that the Kurds could be a ground force partner in Syria much as they have been in Iraq, especially since plans to beef up Syrian insurgents to play that role will take months and may not succeed.
Though that prospect unsettles the Turks, some longtime experts say that Turkey's interest in defeating the Islamic State is ultimately no different than that of the United States and its allies, even if it avoids military action.
'Perhaps Turkey will come to judge that they should participate or overtly support other allies in the airstrikes,' said Francis J. Ricciardone, who recently retired as the American ambassador to Turkey, 'but less visible forms of support also can be important.'
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