Turkey building portable concrete wall at Syrian border

Special to WorldTribune.com

ANKARA — Turkey has been assembling a portable concrete wall along the border with Syria.

Turkey shares a 915-kilometer border with Syria.
Turkey shares a 900-kilometer border with Syria.

Officials said the wall consisted of nine-ton concrete blocks designed for rapid transfer. They said the first phase of the project would span 1.2 kilometers.

“The wall was designed to block smuggling routes,” an official said.

Officials said construction began on April 25 in the Turkish border province of Hatay. They said nearly 200 blocks, each of them three meters long, were delivered and assembled.

The first location of the portable wall was identified as Kusakli, a border town across from the Syrian village of Atmeh. Atmeh has been under Syrian rebel control after its capture from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Turkey has sought to secure its 900-kilometer border with concrete and
other barriers. Barriers have already been established in Gaziantep and
Hatay.

At the same time, Turkey has rushed troops to the border with Iraq. On
April 26, the Kurdish Workers Party was said to have abducted two Turkish
Army officers and injured another nine in an operation in the southeastern
province of Diyarbakir. The PKK was also said to have opened fire from Iraq
on a Turkish Army patrol in the Hakan province.

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