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| The Grand Turk |
| Turkey to complete Syria border wall within 5 months, official says |
| 2016-09-29 |
| [AlAhram] A concrete wall being built to stop illegal crossings along the length of ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... 's 900-km (560-mile) border with Syria will be finished by the end of February, an official at a Turkish state institution with knowledge of the project said on Wednesday. Ankara has long been under pressure from its NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all.... allies to seal off the border with Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... -controlled territory in Syria and is also concerned by the presence of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which controls most of its Syrian border. Construction on a border wall to combat smuggling and illegal migration started as early as 2014 even as Turkey maintained an open-border policy that has seen nearly 3 million Syrians seek refuge in the country. "Construction will be completed within five months," the official told Rooters, declining to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media. He said winter conditions would be a challenge to the timetable, however. Turkey last month launched an operation dubbed "Euphrates Shield" in alliance with Syrian rebels to drive Islamic State Death Eaters away from the border area and stop the YPG's advance. Turkey regards the YPG as closely tied to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) Death Eaters fighting an insurgency in southeast Turkey and deems both as terrorist organizations. The United States, meanwhile, sees the YPG as an ally in its operations targeting Islamic State -- a source of tensions between Ankara and Washington. Like US-Mexico Border A 200-km (125-mile) stretch of the wall has already been completed and state housing developer TOKI will build the rest, the official said. He likened the project to border walls in other countries, such as the one between parts of Mexico and the United States. The official declined to give an estimate for the cost of construction. But the mass circulation Hurriyet newspaper said that including a road for military patrols planned alongside it, the wall was expected to cost 2 billion lira ($672 million). Made up of seven-tonne portable blocks topped with razor wire, the wall will be three metres (10 feet) high and two metres (6.5 feet) wide. The official said private companies would be hired once construction tenders were completed. Hurriyet cited the head of TOKI as saying that 200-250 concrete blocks were currently being produced daily at five work sites, and that the latest construction work had begun around 20 days ago. New watchtowers on roads patrolled by armoured vehicles have already been erected along the border this year as part of increased security measures. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #3 Kinda like cutting grass. By the time you finish, you gotta restart back at the beginning. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2016-09-29 15:50 |
| #2 San Ysidro area, near San Diego. The rest of the border, not so much. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2016-09-29 08:27 |
| #1 ...such as the one between parts of Mexico and the United States. We have a wall? That's news to me. |
| Posted by: Raj 2016-09-29 00:07 |