CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – The first high-level meeting between Turkish and Syrian officials in Moscow last week was cordial but no deals have been made, multiple sources told Middle East Eye.
The Turkish and Syrian defence ministers, along with their Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu, met on Thursday, elevating contacts that had previously been held on a strictly intelligence level. Ministerial contacts between Syria and Turkey had not been held in 11 years.
Turkey’s defence ministry said the parties discussed the the war in Syria, the refugee problem and the fight against “all terror groups” operating on Syrian soil.
Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said he told his Syrian counterpart Ali Mahmoud Abbas and Shoigu that Turkey respects the territorial integrity of all its neighbors and “only aims to fight the terror groups to protect its borders”.
“We strive to put a stop to refugee arrivals,” he said. “We told them that the crisis in Syria must be resolved within the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 2254,” he added, referring to a 2015 roadmap for peace in Syria.
The Turkish and Syrian governments have been foes since 2011, when Turkey became a supporter of the militants against President Bashar al-Assad. Over the decade since, Turkey has backed some militant groups and intervened in northern Syria, where it continues to deploy troops.
With Turkey due to hold presidential elections in June, many observers have speculated that Ankara is aiming to repair its relationship with Damascus to show the voters that it can return some of the nearly four million Syrian refugees living in the country.
One Turkish source with knowledge of the negotiations in Moscow told MEE that Turkey had already rejected one of Damascus’s core demands: designating all militant groups as terrorists.
The source said the Syrian government also wanted to declare the Turkish-controlled areas as “terror zones”, which was also rejected by the Turkish delegation.
The source added that the Syrians didn’t appear willing to work against Syrian Kurdish affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group that has been waging a decades-long war against the Turkish state.
Turkey has been calling on Damascus to create a 30km-deep zone along the Turkish border that would be free of groups that Ankara accuses of being part of the PKK or affiliated with it, such as the so-called People’s Protection Units militia (YPG) and its political arm, the PYD. Ankara also wants Syria to help manage the return of at least one million Syrian refugees.
On Friday, Syrian newspaper al-Watan, which is known to be close to the government, reported that Turkey agreed to withdraw its troops from northern Syria in the Moscow meeting.
A second Turkish source denied the report, describing it as propaganda and accusing the newspaper of taking Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s recent remarks out of context.