Middle East
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul on July 17, 2023. Photo: handout/Turkish presidency
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday said that Ankara has not closed the door for talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but is unwilling to leave northern Syria.
“Right now in Syria, Assad, unfortunately, wants Turkey to leave northern Syria. Such a thing cannot happen,” Erdogan said during a press conference in Istanbul before departing on his planned Gulf tour.
Since a deadly civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, Turkey has supported rebel forces attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and maintains a heavy military presence in northern Syria that fights both the Syrian army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to the ire of Damascus.
“It is all about the way they approach us,” Erdogan said, adding that Syria cannot request other countries inside its borders to withdraw while claiming that Turkey’s position there is to fight “terrorism” on its borders.
Turkey also justifies its presence in Syria on the grounds of its desire to repatriate around four million Syrian refugees who have resided in Turkey since the onset of the civil war. Moreover, it has launched several military operations against Kurdish forces of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – the backbone of the SDF and a force that Ankara views as the extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The PKK is a Kurdish armed group that has fought for cultural and political rights of Kurds in Turkey and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara.
Although Erdogan stated his readiness to hold talks with Assad, the latter set the withdrawal of the Turkish army from the northern regions of the war-torn country as a prerequisite for the talks.
In May, a quadripartite meeting of foreign ministers of Syria, Turkey, Russia, and Iran in Moscow reached an agreement to prepare a roadmap to resolve issues between Ankara and Damascus.
The meeting in May meeting marked the first official setting between foreign ministers of Syria and Turkey since the start of the Syrian civil war.
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