Australia and Turkey to work together to stem the tide of foreign IS fighters
MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu have announced plans to stop the flow of Australians travelling to Syria to fight for the so called Islamic State.
The pair announced they would boost intelligence sharing in a bid to stop foreign fighters using Turkey as a transit point.
Mr Abbott is in Turkey for the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.
Our Middle East correspondent, Matt Brown is in Istanbul and I asked him about the meeting between the two Prime Ministers.
MATT BROWN: The most immediate outcome of their discussions is a boost to intelligence sharing. A senior official told us that there will be more sharing of profiles of people who are of interest to Australian intelligence agencies in order to stop Australians from transiting through Turkey, getting into Syria and joining groups like the Islamic State.
And on that Michael, in the lead up to the Prime Minister’s visit, there was a British couple, one of them being an alleged person of radical Islamic views and that couple had gone missing for two weeks and then following a reported British tip-off to the Turkish authorities, they were picked up with their four little children in Ankara.
So I think that’s possibly an example of where we’re headed here. And today Tony Abbott went out of his way to say that Turkey can’t be expected to act without appropriate information – and obviously Australia’s going to be boosting the process of giving them that information to look at the Australians that are of concern.
MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: And has there been any agreement by the Turks to actually- or commitment by them to actually do anything about the number of Australians transiting through their country?
MATT BROWN: Yes. I mean, I asked the Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu today you know, what concretely will you do to give effect to these communiques? He said we will detain and we will return them if we’re requested to do so.
But looking at the communique the two men issued today obviously they’re still building the legal framework necessary to actually do that. They’re talking about a mutual assistance treaty. That covers a whole range of criminal matters but counterterrorism is amongst them but a specific memorandum of understanding on returning foreign fighters.
So I guess, you know, for a couple of years now we’ve been talking about the growing danger of the Islamic State group in particular but the legal framework and the bureaucratic framework to fight that growing threat is really still just in its infancy.
MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: And Turkeys in a pretty difficult position isn’t it, wedged as it is between the West and what’s happening in Syria and Iraq, and also because of its support for the Syrian opposition?
MATT BROWN: Yeah, that’s right. You’ve got this growing concern about blowback on Western nations whose citizens are going to fight in Syria and just the radicalisation process from Syria coming over the internet, for example.
On the other hand, it is a very porous border. I mean, a couple of years ago, hike across it myself and saw a bunch of foreign fighters and activists and other hangers on heading into Syria; but a lot of others are going through busy border crossings that are controlled by various rebel groups of all shades on the other side.
And as you say, Turkey supports the Syrian rebellion and it continues to point, even today in the press conference with Tony Abbott, to what it sees as a far greater evil of the regime of Syria’s dictator Bashar Al-Assad.
ABC NEWS