Turkey’s intelligence chief has held multiple meetings with his Syrian counterpart in Damascus over the last few weeks, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing four sources, in a sign of Moscow’s efforts to encourage rapprochement between the states on opposite sides of Syria’s civil war.
The head of Tukey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT) Hakan Fidan and Syrian security head Ali Mamlouk met as recently as this week in the Syrian capital, the agency cited a regional source aligned with the Assad regime as saying.
The talks began after Russia – staunch backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad – had nudged Syria to enter talks as Moscow seeks to nail down its position and that of Assad in the event it must redeploy forces to Ukraine amid major losses on the ground over the past week, the Damascus-allied source told Reuters.
Once an ally of Damascus, Turkey has been involved in Syria’s civil war for 11 years 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.
-The most recent meetings, which include a two-day visit by Fidan to Damascus at the end of August, had sought to lay the ground for sessions at a higher level, according to Syrian regime-allied source.
The Turkish government does not want to see Iranian or Iran-backed forces, which are presently widely deployed in government-controlled regions of Syria, filling in gaps left by Russian withdrawals, Reuters cited a senior Turkish official as saying.
Russia is also against the expansion of Iranian influence in the region, the source said.
Turkish-Syrian contacts made a lot of progress, according to the regional source allied to Damascus and a second senior pro-Assad source, who stopped short of giving details.
According to a third regional source aligned with Damascus, Ankara-Damascus relations had begun to thaw and were advancing to a stage of “creating a climate for understanding”.
Top officials from Turkey’s ruling and far-right coalition partner parties have in recent weeks issued statements signalling the start of talks between Damascus and Ankara, following more than a decade of tensions.
In a sharp change of tone last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Ankara would need to take “higher steps” with Damascus to end the “games” being played in the region, adding that Turkey cannot totally cut off diplomatic relations with the Assad regime.
But the Turkish leader has also since May repeated plans for a fresh offensive into the neighbouring country.
Since August 2016, Turkey has launched four military operations in northern Syria, where Russia, the Syrian regime and the United States also have troops, directed at ISIS and the YPG. Turkey sees the YPG as an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group that has fought for Kurdish autonomous rights in Turkey for almost four decades, and thus an existential threat.
Ahval