Tillerson works to repair ties with Turkey

Washington (CNN)The US and Turkey will create working groups to tackle unresolved areas of tension, including Washington's anti-ISIS partnership with a Kurdish group Turkey staunchly opposes.
Acknowledging that US-Turkey relations have been in crisis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his Turkish counterpart said Friday in Ankara that the two countries will create the groups to deal with points of friction.
Even as Tillerson called out Turkey's increasingly dire record on democratic norms, and its plans to purchase Russian military equipment in violation of US sanctions, he stressed the need to move forward.

"We find ourselves at a bit of a crisis point in the relationship," Tillerson said, acknowledging a point that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu repeatedly made during their press appearance together.

During a meeting of more than three hours on Thursday evening, Tillerson said he and Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan decided they needed to concentrate on how to move forward.
"The relationship is too important, it's too valuable to NATO and our NATO allies, it's too valuable to the American people, it's too valuable to the Turkish people for us to not do anything other than concentrate on how are we going forward," Tillerson said.
"We know we need to move with some sense of urgency and promise to address this because we have a serious situation still inside of Syria and we need to address that jointly together," the top diplomat added.
The priority, Tillerson said, will be Manbij, a Syrian town that the Kurdish YPG, with the support of US troops, has seized from ISIS. Turkey sees the YPG as a terrorist organization and launched a military operation in Syria in response to Kurdish territorial gains. 

SOURCE :- cnn