BEIRUT/ANKARA, December 2 (Portal) – Syria is resisting Russian efforts to negotiate a summit with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, three sources said on Friday, after more than a decade of bitter enmity since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war.
However, two Turkish sources, including a senior official, denied that Damascus was hesitating and said things were on track for an eventual meeting between the leaders.
Erdogan’s government has backed rebel fighters trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and has accused the Syrian leader of state terrorism and said early in the conflict that peace efforts could not continue under his rule.
Assad says it is Turkey that has supported terrorism, backing a number of militants, including Islamist factions, and launching repeated military incursions into northern Syria. Ankara is preparing another possible operation after blaming Syrian Kurdish fighters for a bombing in Istanbul.
Russia helped Assad turn the tide of the war in his favor and says it wants a political end to the conflict and to bring the two leaders together for talks.
Erdogan has signaled readiness for rapprochement.
A week after shaking hands with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last month, after repeatedly saying he could not meet a leader who came to power in a coup, he said Turkey could “get things moving with Syria.”
“There must be no resentment in politics,” he said in a television discussion at the weekend.
However, three sources with knowledge of Syria’s position on possible talks said Assad had rejected a proposal for Erdogan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Two of the sources said Damascus believes such a meeting could bolster Erdogan ahead of next year’s Turkish elections, especially if it addresses Ankara’s goal of bringing back some of Turkey’s 3.6 million Syrian refugees.
“Why give Erdogan a victory for nothing? There will be no rapprochement before the elections,” said one of the two, adding that Syria had also rejected the idea of a meeting of foreign ministers.
The third source, a diplomat with knowledge of the proposal, said Syria “considers such a meeting useless if it does not bring anything concrete, and what they have been demanding so far is the complete withdrawal of Turkish troops.”
Turkish officials said this week the army would need just days to be ready for a ground incursion into northern Syria, where it has already been conducting artillery and airstrikes.
But the government has also said it is ready for talks with Damascus if they focus on security at the border, where Ankara wants Syrian-Kurdish YPG fighters evicted from the border and refugees moved to “safe zones”. will.
An Assad-Erdogan meeting is possible “in the not too distant future,” said the senior Turkish official.
“Putin is slowly preparing the way for this,” the official said. “It would be the start of a big change in Syria and would have a very positive impact on Turkey. Russia would also benefit from this … as it is overburdened in many areas.”
Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Laila Bassam in Beirut and Orhan Coskun in Ankara; Writing by Dominic Evans, editing by William Maclean and Rosalba O’Brien
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