Turkey builds wall with Kurdish-held town of Tel Abyad

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - Turkey began constructing a modular concrete wall of 30 kilometers (18 miles) length on Friday on the border with the town of Tel Abyad in Syrian Kurdistan.

Construction machines put concrete blocks of four-meter height and two-meter width in place as armored military vehicles provided security, said Turkish state-run Anadolu agency.

Authorities justified the building of the wall as a measure against smuggling and illegal border crossings into Turkey from the war-torn Syria, relayed the agency.

Turkey shares a border of about 900 km (560 mile) with Syria from where it hosts more than three million refugees.

Tel Abyad used to be under the rule of the Islamic State (IS) group until June 2015 when the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) supported by the United States-led Coalition airstrikes took its control.

The town called Girespi in Kurdish is about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of the de facto IS capital of Raqqa.

With the northern town's liberation, Kurdish forces deprived the IS of one its most critical access points to Turkey and the wider world including Europe where it has staged bloody attacks.

The US long complained of a lack of a Turkish effort to stop the flow of foreign Islamist fighters from around the world into Syria to topple the regime of the President Bashar al-Assad.

Concrete blocks in Tel Abyad are a part of a wall whose construction began in early 2015, stretching along all the Turkish-Syrian border.

When finished, the wall would cost 2 billion Turkish Lira (USD$528 million), according to a September 2016 Hurriyet newspaper report.

Editing by Ava Homa