Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly instructed his foreign minister Hakan Fidan on Friday to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and begin the process of restoring relations between Turkey and Syria, which after breaking down in 1998 when Ankara accused Damascus of supporting the PKK, were completely severed following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 and the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on the opposition, which caused millions of Syrian refugees to flee to Turkey.
“I have already proposed to Assad a visit to Turkey or a meeting in a third country, and I have instructed my foreign minister on this matter,” Erdoğan told reporters quoted by Turkish media from Washington, where he attended the NATO summit. “We want to start a new process that overcomes the resentment (between the two countries),” added the Turkish president, who in a radical shift in Syria policy announced last Sunday that he was inviting Assad to start negotiations to restore ties between the two countries.
Erdoğan’s proposal was not, however, a spontaneous act: in June, Assad had already taken the first step by declaring that Damascus was open to any kind of initiative aimed at reviving Turkish-Syrian relations “as long as they are based on respect for the sovereignty of the Syrian state over all its territory and the fight against all forms of terrorism“. The Syrian leader also wants Turkish troops to leave northern Syria, from where the Turkish army has expelled the YPG, the Syrian branch of the PKK terrorist group.
Although it is highly unlikely that Turkey will abandon its positions in northern Syria in the medium term, Erdoğan has recently insisted that ‘Turkey is ready to support a united, prosperous and peaceful Syria after a fair, honourable and inclusive agreement’ with the Syrian opposition: ‘We will not refuse to meet with anyone we have to meet with on this issue, as we have done in the past’.
In 2023 there was already an attempt of rapprochement between the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and Erdoğan’s government through a negotiation process under the mediation of Russia and Iran, the main supporters of the Damascus regime and with whom Ankara maintains good relations. However, in this process Ankara faces the reluctance of Syrian opposition groups that have relied on Turkey for support over the past decade, to whom the Turkish president said in a recent interview that ‘we will not fail those who have trusted us, those who have sought refuge in us, and those who have acted with us’.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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