ISTANBUL/ANKARA: Turkey is asking allies including the United States to take part in a joint ground operation in Syria, as a Moscow-backed government advance nears its borders, raising the possibility of direct confrontation between the NATO member and Russia.

Meanwhile, Dutch F-16 fighter jets bombed Daesh targets for the first time in Syria since broadening its mission in the US-led air campaign, the Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.

“Dutch F-16s carried out around 10 missions over Iraq and eastern Syria,” the Hague-based ministry said in its weekly summary of operations on its website.

It is the first time the summary has mentioned targets in Syria since the Dutch government late last month announced it was fanning out its current air support mission over Iraq into Syria, in the wake of US and French requests.

The airstrikes were directed against “combat positions, military equipment and strategic aims of the Daesh terror organization,” the ministry said, without detailing when and where the attacks took place. The Netherlands is participating in the Iraq strikes with four F-16 aircraft specializing in close air support of ground operations by Iraqi forces.

Late last year in the wake of the November Paris attacks, the Dutch government received a request from US and French allies to broaden its campaign against the Daesh group.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in January said the extended air operations would target eastern Syria “in particular to stop Daesh ‘pipeline’ leading from Syria into Iraq.”

US airstrikes in Iraq began in August 2014 after Daesh captured a swathe of territory in Iraq and Syria in a lightning offensive.

Washington and Arab allies broadened the strikes against Daesh into Syria a month later in September 2014, with the US also leading moves to build an international coalition of some 60 nations against the jihadists.

The four Dutch F-16 jet fighters which have been pounding Daesh militants in Iraq since October 2014 will “remain active until July 1 over the enlarged zone,” the government said last month.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders has cautioned however that bombing was not the whole solution in a “complex conflict” in Syria.

Russia on Tuesday rejected claims that its warplanes struck a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders in northern Syria.

Separately, a 12-year-old Syrian boy said he hoped for an audience with Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf after describing his family’s perilous journey to the Nordic country in a moving letter to the figurehead monarch.

The royal palace confirmed Tuesday that the king had received the letter from Ahmed, whose mother asked that his surname not be published because he’s a minor. The family is still waiting to hear whether it will be granted refugee status.