Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that he has proposed to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to hold a trilateral meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and thus open a process of negotiations.
Erdogan has indicated that he has conveyed to Putin the offer to organize a meeting, an initiative that the Russian leader «would have welcomed». «This will mark the beginning of a series of talks,» he said, according to information from the Anatolia news agency.
In this sense, he defended «joint decision-making between Russia, Turkey and Syria» and said that to achieve this goal «it is necessary to organize meetings between defense representatives of the three countries and high-ranking officials».
Last November, Erdogan indicated that Turkey-Syria relations could improve in the same way that Ankara’s relations with Cairo had improved. Erdogan has maintained a close relationship with al Assad in the past, although the situation changed after the outbreak of war in 2011, when the Turkish leader stepped forward in support of al Assad’s rivals.
