Turkey warned on Saturday (14th) that “a military ground operation” in Syria is “possible at any time”, according to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s adviser, Ibrahim Kalin.
“We continue to support the political process,” which began at the end of December with a meeting of Turkish and Syrian defense ministers in Moscow, Kalin said. “However, a ground operation is possible at any time, depending on the level of threats received,” Kalin told reporters from several foreign media outlets.
The adviser pointed out that it is possible for the two countries’ defense ministers to meet again ahead of the meeting between Turkish and Syrian foreign ministers scheduled for midFebruary.
“We want security at our borders,” he reasoned, claiming that Kurdish forces are present on Syrian territory. “We never attacked [interesses] of the Syrian state or Syrian civilians,” he said.
However, Kalin denounced that the security guarantees promised by Russia and the United States after the last Turkish offensive in Syria in 2019 “were not fulfilled” and that the Kurdish fighters were not 30 kilometers from the border as promised.
For his part, Syrian President Bashar alAssad warned on Thursday (12) that there must be “an end to the occupation” of Turkey in northern Syria before a meeting between him and his Turkish counterpart.
On the other hand, Kalin specified that the next Turkish presidential elections will be held in May and not in June as planned, although a date has not yet been set.
Kalin also said the country wants to promote a “local” ceasefire in Ukraine because it doesn’t expect a more comprehensive peace deal at the moment.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine “are capable of winning militarily,” he said, confident that “in the end they will have to negotiate to reach a mutually acceptable outcome.”
“Right now nobody wants to stop fighting, but we have to keep asking them to,” he said. “If we cannot reach a global peace deal, we will seek a localized and limited ceasefire and local deescalations,” he added.
Since the conflict began on February 24, Turkey, which has good relations with both countries, has offered mediation to end the war, “the worst international challenge since World War II,” he assessed.
“We have already achieved quite a bit,” he said, citing the agreement signed in midlast year on Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea and the Bosphorus (nearly 18 million tons exported so far) and facilitating the exchange of prisoners of war. .
“But that’s not enough (…), it’s just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle,” he said.