Thousands of people have taken to the streets in different cities in northern Syria to protest the meeting between Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and his Syrian and Russian counterparts in a sign of a possible rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus.
The demonstrators, dressed with Syrian flags, protested in different cities in northern Syria, such as Afrin, Yarabulus, Idlib or Azaz, in the governorate of Aleppo, according to the opposition news portal Shaam.
The Syrians have shouted chants against the Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, and have carried banners with slogans such as «we die, but we do not reconcile with Al Assad», as reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The meeting, which has generated unease among the Syrian population in the north of the country, is the first of its kind since the Syrian war broke out in 2011 and took place in Moscow to address the Syrian crisis in a sign of a possible strengthening of bilateral relations, damaged because of the conflict and Turkey’s support to various rebel groups.
The meeting between the parties took place after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in mid-December to hold a trilateral meeting with Al Assad, and thus open a process of negotiations.
The Turkish army has in recent years launched several offensives against Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria – mainly the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – which has been denounced by Baghdad and Damascus as a violation of their sovereignty.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
