Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has stressed that the trilateral meeting with his Syrian and Russian counterparts addressed possible actions to «improve the situation» in the Arab country and the region to «ensure peace, tranquility and stability.»
«We have stressed that we respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all our neighbors, especially Syria and Iraq, and that our only goal is to fight terrorism. We have no other purpose,» he has said, Turkish state news agency Anatolia reported.
The Turkish army has launched several offensives in recent years 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.
Thus, he has revealed that he has conveyed to Moscow and Damascus that Ankara «makes efforts to ensure the security of the country, the nation and the borders» and to «prevent further migration from Syria to Turkey», while he has opted for resolving the crisis within the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
Akar has stressed that this dialogue will not go against the interests of the Syrian opposition and refugees in Turkey. «It is beyond any doubt that we can do anything against our Syrian brothers and sisters living in Turkey and Syria,» he said.
«We have never considered and will never consider behavior that could get them in trouble. Everyone should know this and act accordingly,» the Turkish defense minister concluded, as reported by the daily ‘Hurriyet’.
The meeting, the first of its kind since the Syrian war broke out in 2011, took place in Moscow to address the Syrian crisis, in a sign of a possible rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus, whose bilateral relations have been strained by the conflict and Turkey’s support for various rebel groups.
The meeting took place after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in mid-December to hold a trilateral meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and thus open a process of negotiations.
The war in Syria broke out due to the repression by the security forces of a series of pro-democracy demonstrations in the framework of the ‘Arab Spring’, which led to calls for the resignation of al-Assad and subsequently to the creation of dozens of rebel groups to fight the army.
For its part, Russia is one of the main international supporters of the Syrian president and its military intervention in 2015 allowed government forces to repel rebel advances and take back the initiative on the battlefield.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
