U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah Thursday morning to discuss, among other things, U.S. military operations in Syria.

Kerry also met with diplomats from Bahrain and the Gulf Cooperation Council to update them on previous meetings with Russia regarding military action in Syria.

Kerry wants to shore up support among other Gulf nations for the Syria plan ahead of scheduled meetings with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland.

During the meeting with Lavrov, the two sides will try to come to an agreement over military cooperation and information sharing in a bid to defeat Islamic State militants in Syria.

Turkish offensive to rout IS

Kerry’s visit to Saudi Arabia comes a day after Turkey launched an offensive attack into Syria to force IS fighters out of the town of Jarablus, which the jihadists have controlled since 2014 and which sits just across Turkey’s southern border.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Islamic State fighters put up “very little resistance” before fleeing to neighboring villages in the face of the Turkish onslaught.

Kerry spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in an early phone call Thursday as at least 10 more Turkish tanks crossed the border into Syria to join up with the troops involved in the initial attacks. Sources with knowledge of the call said the two pledged to continue the fight against IS together.

Kerry told Cavusoglu that Syrian Kurdish forces, who had also been battling the IS militants in Syria, had started to withdraw to the eastern side of the Euphrates River. Turkey demanded that the Kurds pull out of the border area after it sent troops in to clear out the IS stronghold.

Raqqa operation

Later Thursday, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting the IS group said the Kurds had moved completely east of the river “to prepare for the eventual liberation of Raqqa.”  However, there were conflicting reports as to whether that withdrawal had been completed.

Turkey’s defense minister Fikri Isik on Thursday said the mission into Syria had two major goals, the first being to secure the Turkish border, and the second to make sure the Kurdish forces “are not there.”

Isik said it is Turkey’s “right to remain there” until the Syrian rebel forces can take control of the area. He said the U.S. and Turkey agreed to a timeline that would see the Kurdish forces pull out of the area within two weeks. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday that if the Kurdish forces refused to move east of the river, the U.S. would cut off their support.

Russia’s foreign ministry expressed deep concern about the operation, especially Turkey’s targeting of Kurdish militia fighters. It said that Turkey, by targeting both Islamic State militants and Syrian Kurds, could further inflame the Syrian civil war, leading to “flare-ups of inter-ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs.”
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