David Cameron was in Turkey on Tuesday for talks on how to deal with the threat so-called Islamic State in neighbouring Syria and Iraq.
During his visit to Ankara on Tuesday he met his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoğlu and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Downing Street said before the visit that the discussions would seek to build on existing counter-terrorism co-operation and would also focus on boosting trade.
In a joint press conference with Mr Davutoğlu the British prime minister said:
“On the question of what more Turkey and indeed Britain can do to stop this scourge of foreign fighters and defeat this ideology of violence, I believe we are, all of us, taking the steps that we should.
“We’ve passed legislation through our parliament, we are taking people’s passports, we are confronting and prosecuting people who have travelled to Turkey.
“We’re working as closely as we possibly can and the prime minister and I have agreed that we should exchange even more information, we should cooperate more in terms of intelligence, we should work hand in glove because the people who are travelling, whether from Britain or elsewhere, sometimes through Turkey, sometimes in other ways to Syria and Iraq, these are people that threaten us back at home so we should do everything that we can and we’ve had very productive discussions today”.
But Mr Davutoğlu blamed “foreign propaganda” in the foreign press for creating the impression that people were crossing Turkish territory on their way to fighting for IS in Syria.
He said: “This is a threat for the security of Turkey in addition to other countries. In some of the foreign press there is propaganda as if the foreign fighters are passing through Turkey… but Isis actually emerged in Iraq and when Iraq was under US control they developed with the support of the Syrian regime. In no way did any Isis leader pass through the Turkish border.”
Mr Cameron also reiterated his support for Turkey’s EU membership bid by saying: “In terms of Turkish membership of the EU, I very much support that.
“That’s a longstanding position of British foreign policy which I support. We discussed that again in our talks today.”