Iraq’s senior minister stated on Friday that the country’s government is going to organize the first meeting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Iraq’s Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told reporters in Washington after the NATO meeting that Baghdad got signs from both Ankara and Damascus indicating that they were ready for the reconciliation.
Fuad Hussein stated “The Russians also started to talk about mediating between Syria and Turks. But I have a feeling we are going to invite the two sides in Baghdad, and when I will come back, I’m going to reach out to my colleague, the Syrian foreign minister, so that we can fix a date. Both sides in principle are ready to sit down. And both sides accepted the meditation,” he added.
Damascus is displeased with Turkey because it supported rebel groups in Syria who wanted to topple Assad and continues to station forces in the opposition-held northwest. Though earlier attempts to restore ties between the two nations have not succeeded, there has been attempts to do so on several occasions.
Turkey and Syria
Russia has been advocating for the resumption of diplomatic relations with Turkey, despite being one of Assad’s government’s biggest supporters. The military ministers of Russia, Turkey, and Syria convened in Moscow in December 2022, marking the first ministerial-level gathering of the bitter enemies since 2011. Last year, Russia mediated talks between Turkish and Syrian authorities.
But the negotiations broke down, and Syrian authorities kept criticizing Turkey’s position in the country’s northwest in public. In August of last year, Assad stated in a Sky News Arabia interview that Erdogan‘s overtures were intended “to legitimize the Turkish occupation in Syria.”
However, this time Iraq, which borders both Syria and Turkey, has also volunteered to intervene. Iraq may have taken the lead to divert Turkish pressure to suppress the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist organization that has bases in northern Iraq and has been fighting an insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s, according to Aron Lund, a fellow at the Century International think tank.
Baghdad could be attempting to “create some form of positive engagement with the Turks, kick the can down the road, and deflect the threat of an intervention,” according to Lund, by promoting reconciliation with Syria.
According to Unluhisarcikli, Erdogan’s attempt to intervene is probably motivated in part by the growing anti-Syrian sentiment in Turkey. Erdogan probably wants an agreement that would allow many of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees now residing in his nation to return.
Reestablishing ties with Turkey would be a significant step for Syria in bringing an end to Assad’s political exile in the region, which has lasted for almost ten years as a result of his government’s violent suppression of demonstrators in 2011 and subsequent accusations of war crimes.
And while Damascus and Ankara disagree on Turkey’s involvement in northwest Syria, they both want to limit the autonomy of Kurds communities there.
