Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Thursday that the recent rapprochement between Damascus and Ankara, sponsored by the Russian side, must aim at ending the Turkish occupation of Syrian territory.
Al Assad defended this position in a statement issued by the Syrian Presidency after attending a meeting with Alexander Lavrentiev, special envoy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which they discussed the strategic Syrian-Russian relations.
On the other hand, the Syrian president has also shown himself in favor of the Russian invasion in Ukraine while assuring that, despite the strong pressure against it, neither the United States nor its allies have managed to isolate Moscow, as reported by the SANA news agency.
This is the first time that Al Assad has spoken out about the rapprochement with Turkey after the meeting that took place at the end of December between the Syrian Minister of Defense, Ali Mahmud Abbas, his Turkish counterpart, Hulusi Akar, and the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, in Moscow.
After that, Akar assured that the trilateral meeting with his Syrian and Russian counterparts addressed possible actions to «improve the situation» in the Arab country and in the region to «guarantee peace, tranquility and stability».
The meeting, the first of its kind since the Syrian war broke out in 2011, 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.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
