Summary Obama also called for Assad to step down in Syria and reaffirmed closing Guantanamo Bay.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama urged Turkey s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to pull troops out of Iraq Friday, amid a row that has split key members of the coalition fighting the Islamic State group.
Obama "urged President Erdogan to take additional steps to deescalate tensions with Iraq, including by continuing to withdraw Turkish military forces," the White House said after a phonecall between the two leaders.
Obama also "reinforced the need for Turkey to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq."
The Iraqi government has demanded the "complete withdrawal" of Turkish forces from its territory, indicating Ankara s partial pullout was not enough.
Perennially embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has faced intense political pressure to end the Turkish deployment.
Turkey said it had deployed troops and tanks to a military camp in northern Iraq earlier this month to protect Turkish trainers working with anti-Islamic State groups.
Observers have suggested Ankara is also trying to forestall efforts by its arch-foe, Kurdish rebel group the Kurdistan Workers Party, to expand its influence in the region.
Obama says Assad must go
President Obama reaffirmed US insistence that Syria s President Bashar al-Assad step down, warning there can be no peace there without a legitimate government.
"I think that Assad is going to have to leave in order for the country to stop the blood(shed), for all the parties involved to be able to move forward in a nonsectarian way," Obama said at a year-end news conference.
"He has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the country."
Obama spoke as US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held a meeting of foreign ministers in New York to discuss a political settlement to the nearly five year-old war.
A UN draft resolution was to be presented at the UN Security Council later in the day that calls for Syrian peace talks to begin in early January.
Obama said Assad s remaining in power, after having chosen to "slaughter" his people rather than pursue an inclusive political transition, "is not feasible."
"As a consequence, our view has been that you cannot bring peace to Syria, you cannot get an end to the civil war unless you have a government that it is recognized as legitimate by a majority of that country. It will not happen," he said.
He said Kerry s efforts in New York offered "an opportunity, not to turn back the clock -- it s going to be difficult to completely overcome the devastation that s happened in Syria already -- but to find a political transition that maintains the Syrian state, that recognizes a bunch of stakeholders inside of Syria and hopefully to initiate a ceasefire."
He said such a ceasefire "won t be perfect, but allows all the parties to turn on what should be our number one focus and that is destroying Daesh and its allies in the region."
Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, the extremist movement that now controls large parts of Syria and Iraq, and claimed responsibility for the terror attacks in Paris November 13.
Reaffirms closing terror magnet Guantanamo
President Barack Obama reaffirmed his determination to close Guantanamo Bay, with backing from Congress or -- as a last resort -- by executive decree.
"Guantanamo continues to be one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment," Obama told a year-end news conference.
"We see the Internet traffic. We see how Guantanamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam," said the president, who made shutting down the military prison in Cuba a central electoral pledge.
Obama has repeatedly clashed with the Republican-dominated Congress for blocking his efforts to close the prison, and he left open the door to bypassing them altogether if they continue to do so.
"We will wait until Congress has said no to a plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here," he said.
The White House is currrently working on a new proposal to close the prison set up in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
"I m not going to automatically assume that Congress says no," Obama said. "Every once in a while they will surprise you."
Obama s remarks follow the announcement that 17 low-risk detainees will be transferred from Guantanamo Bay, probably in mid-January, putting the military prison s population below 100.
