Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday hit back at charges that his country is allowing extremists to flow across its long border with Syria, calling for greater intelligence cooperation.

"In no way Turkey tolerates or will be tolerating any extremist groups crossing Turkish borders," the minister told reporters, speaking in English after meetings in Washington with top U.S. officials.

Turkey on Monday said it was not considering a general amnesty for Kurdish rebels as the government stepped up efforts to restart a stalled peace process with the outlawed Kurdish PKK group.

The issue came to the fore on Saturday when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted in the country's Kurdish-majority southeast that Turkish prisons would one day be emptied.

The United States will keep two Patriot missile batteries in Turkey for another year to help bolster the country's air defenses against threats from Syria's civil war, the Pentagon said Monday.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Washington's decision in talks at the Pentagon that focused on the conflict in Syria, a spokesman said.

Turkey on Monday announced a mass vaccination campaign against an outbreak of polio in areas near neighboring Syria.

"We are planning to vaccinate about one million children under five years old," public health agency vice president Mehmet Ali Torunoglu told private NTV television.

The Turkish army shot dead three Syrians attempting to illegally cross the border at a minefield separating the two countries, the news agency Dogon reported Sudnay.

At around 1:30 am local time Sunday (2330 GMT Saturday) the army fired at the Syrians, described as smugglers, after shouting warnings as they crossed the minefield near the village of Yeniyol in the southeastern Mardin region, the agency said.

Turkey on Friday warned that it would not accept this week's declaration of provisional self-rule by Kurds in neighboring war-torn Syria.

"Turkey cannot permit a fait accompli, there is no question of accepting such a thing in Syria," Turkish President Abdullah Gul said in televised comments in eastern Turkey.

The announcement of a new transitional authority in Syrian Kurdistan marks a key point in the ethnic group's moves towards self-rule, but experts say disunity and war could still scupper their hopes.

Tuesday's declaration of a temporary autonomous administration in Kurdish-dominated parts of northern Syria, a plan initially mooted in July, came after Kurdish forces made territorial gains against jihadists.

Turkey is hoping to finalize negotiations to acquire its first long-range anti-missile system from China in six months' time, the head of the country's procurement agency said Thursday.

"The immediate goal for us is in about six months to come to a reasonable level in our contract negotiations and to understand whether it's possible to implement this program," Murad Bayar, head of undersecretariat for defense industries, told reporters in Istanbul.

Turkey has asked NATO to extend for another year the deployment of surface-to-air Patriot missiles to protect its troubled border with Syria because of a continuing "serious" threat, officials said on Wednesday.

"We have received a letter from the Turkish government requesting the continuation of the Patriot mission," a NATO official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

The European Court on Human Rights Tuesday ruled that Turkey bombed two Kurdish villages in 1994, killing 33 people in an attack Ankara blamed on Kurdish separatists.

The Strasbourg-based court ordered Turkey to pay 2.3 million euros ($3.1 million) to 38 plaintiffs whose relatives were killed in the bombing and urged "further investigative steps into the incident."