Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu on Tuesday called for reconciliation between Syria’s Assad regime and the opposition for the establishment of “permanent stability” in the war-torn country.
Turkey is against the “spilling of blood” in Syria, Evrensel newspaper cited Çavuşoğlu as saying during a live programme on TVNET network, adding that Turkey had “paid the highest price” for the 11-year civil war in the neighbouring country.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week hinted at the possibility of meeting Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad in the future, confirming Ankara’s tentative steps to restore ties with the neighbouring war-torn country despite backing rebel groups in the country’s civil war.
Turkish officials earlier this year began voicing the possibility of starting dialogue with Damascus to address a string of issues, including a political solution to the war and the accompanying Syrian refugee crisis.
“For permanent stability in Syria, the opposition and regime need to come to an agreement,” Çavuşoğlu said.
Once an ally of Damascus, Turkey maintains an involvement in Syria’s civil war on the side of the opposition. The country has since 2016 launched four cross-border operations into northern Syria targeting Kurdish forces linked to an insurgency on its own soil and to prevent the formation of what it calls a terror corridor and controls swaths of territory in northern Syria with allied Syrian rebels.
Turkey is home to some 3.7 Syrian migrants, the largest in the world, which arrived following the civil war in Syria in 2011. The demographic has been faced with a wave of xenophobia in Turkey, with anti-refugee sentiment being bolstered by the country’s high unemployment rate and ailing economy.
Ahval