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The Moscow-brokered meeting between the defence ministers of Turkey and Syria last week was cordial, but the parties generally rejected each other’s core demands, London-based Middle East Eye (MEE) reported on Monday citing unnamed Turkish sources.
The Turkish delegation led by the Defence Minister Hulusi Akar rejected Damascus’ demands for designating all Syrian rebels as terrorists and declaring Turkish-controlled areas in north Syria as “terror zones”, a Turkish source told MEE.
According to Akar, through rapprochement with Syria, Turkey mainly aims to ensure the safe return of Syrian refugees to their homeland and prevent what Ankara calls terrorist threats to Turkey posed by Kurdish armed groups in northeast Syria.
Turkey has for years expressed an intent to establish a 30-kilometre deep “safe zone” by clearing the borders of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
“However, Damascus has shown little appetite to comply, and instead asked Turkey to immediately withdraw from Syrian territory as a precondition for talks beginning,” the Turkish sources told MEE, adding that the precondition was lifted after Russia intervened.
Despite problems in finding a common ground, high-level tripartite meetings between Turkey, Syria and Russia are expected to continue.
The Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuğoğlu said on Tuesday that the meeting between three countries’ top diplomats would be held in the second half of January.
Çavuşoğlu will also go to Washington on January 17 to meet his US counterparts.
The minister told reporters on Monday that the United States had not directly showed a negative response to the meeting between Turkey and Syria. “But we also understand that they are against such a normalisation,” he said.
