Turkey has completed construction of a 764-kilometer (475 mile) concrete wall along its border with Syria, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, citing a Turkish official.
The Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKI) erected 564 kilometers of the wall, while the governor’s office of the border provinces constructed 200 kilometers of it, the official told Anadolu on condition of anonymity.
Ankara had launched the construction project in 2015 to build an 826-kilometer wall on the Syrian border as part of Turkey’s measures to increase border security and combat smuggling and illegal border crossings.
Turkey shares a 911-kilometer border with Syria, which has been involved in a civil war since 2011.
The wall has been completed in Turkey’s border provinces of Sanliurfa, Gaziantep, Kilis, Hatay, Mardin and Sirnak.
The official added that the state housing developer’s construction of a 144-kilometer wall on the Iranian border was almost finished.
The border wall project incorporates physical, electronic and advanced technology layers.
The physical layer includes modular concrete walls, patrol routes, manned and unmanned towers and passenger tracks.
Modular walls are being erected along the Turkish-Syrian border with seven-ton mobile blocks, two meters wide and three meters high. The blocks have also been topped with a one-meter-high razor wire.
An electronic layer consists of close-up surveillance systems, thermal cameras, land surveillance radar, remote-controlled weapons systems, command-and-control centers, line-length imaging systems and seismic and acoustic sensors.
The advanced technology layer of the project includes wide area surveillance, laser destructive fiber-optic detection, surveillance radar for drone detection, jammers and sensor-triggered short distance lighting systems.