Kerry: United States, Turkey working to finish shutting northern Syria border

We're weeks away conceivably from the possibility of a big transition for Syria, and I don't think enough people necessarily notice that.

Speaking at the end of the G-20 meetings in Turkey on Monday, US President Barack Obama said the coordinated attacks in the French capital were a setback in the fight against the ISIL in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), but that putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria to combat them "would be a mistake".

"Daesch has less territory", he said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

There have been deep divisions over the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"The entire border of northern Syria - 75 percent of it has now been shut off. And we are entering an operation with the Turks to shut off the other remaining 98 kilometers", Kerry said in an interview with CNN.

Ten warplanes have targeted so-called Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa for the third consecutive day on Tuesday, France's defence minister said, vowing the campaign against the group would intensify in the coming days.

Before seeing Hollande, Kerry met with diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in Paris to thank them for their service. In his comments, Kerry drew a distinction between Friday's attacks and the January attack against the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which extremists said they targeted for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. It wasn't to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. The United States previously voiced its intention to train and arm a moderate Syrian force that would take control over the area and defend it from IS, preventing the smuggling of fighters, arms and other goods across the border. "And, I would like to have USA trainers", he said.

Kerry was asked, "How could the US' and the West's expectations of ISIS be so wrong?"

"Don't hold your breath: Russia-U.S. anti-terror alliance is not in the making", Dmitry Trenin, a former colonel in the Russian army and director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said on Twitter on Wednesday.