Erdogan ready to welcome Assad, Putin as Syria-Turkey channels widen

ANKARA In the latest sign of the ongoing rapprochement between Damascus and Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that he might invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Turkey.

“We could have an invitation for Mr. Putin and Bashar al-Assad. If Mr. Putin can visit Turkey, this could be the beginning of a new process,” Erdogan told reporters on Thursday upon his return from Kazakhstan, according to the text published by the Turkish presidency's communications directorate.

The recent calm on the ground [in Syria] We can open the door to peace through smart policies and solutions-oriented, bias-free approaches, he added.

The remarks come as Erdogan and Assad have discussed in recent weeks the possibility of a resumption of dialogue between Ankara and Damascus. Erdogan met Putin on Wednesday on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Kazakh capital, where the two leaders discussed Syria, among other issues.

“We will always support a prosperous, united and inclusive Syria, embracing each other based on a new social contract,” Erdogan added, referring to UN-led talks to draft a new constitution for Syria, which stalled in 2022.

The comments were apparently aimed at reassuring Turkish-backed Syrian opposition groups that have staged mass protests against Turkey this week, in what analysts describe as a backlash against the Turkish president expressing openness to meeting with Assad.

Anti-Turkey protests in rebel-held areas of northern Syria have left seven people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based war monitoring group.

Calibrating his tone on a possible thaw with Assad on Tuesday after the end of the protests, Erdogan promised that Turkey would remember those who acted with us.

Speaking last week to Russian Syria envoy Alexander Lavrentiev, Assad said Syria welcomed all reconciliation initiatives with Turkey after Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said last month that his government was working toward reconciliation between Ankara and Damascus.

Direct talks between senior Turkish and Syrian officials launched in 2022 under the auspices of Russia have failed, with the Syrian government pushing for Turkish forces to withdraw from the country. Russia and Iran are the main international backers of the Assad government.

Ankara fears that such a move would create a power vacuum that could be filled by the US-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which Turkey views as a major threat to its national security because of its own decades-long Kurdish problem. Turkey equates the Kurdish-led SDF with the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has been waging an armed campaign for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since 1984. The SDF is a major ally of the US-led international coalition against the Islamic State in parts of northern and eastern Syria.

Turkey's main motivation for resuming negotiations with Assad is to crush the de facto autonomous Kurdish-led region in northern and eastern Syria, which is under the control of the SDF.

Erdogan said that the instability in Syria provides space for terrorist organizations, especially the SDF. It is important to eradicate these terrorist structures, he added.

Ankara is also seeking to ensure the return of some Syrian refugees to their home countries. Turkey has more than 3.2 million registered Syrians, according to official figures. The number of unregistered Syrians is not known.

The climate of peace that will emerge in Syria is also necessary for the return to their country of millions of people scattered in different countries, added the Turkish president.