Meeting with Erdogan depends on ‘content’: Assad

ERBIL, Kurdistan region - Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday that he was open to meeting Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pending the content of the meeting itself.

“If the meeting leads to results, or if the embrace, or the reproach … achieves the country's interest, I will do it. But the problem does not lie here. It does not lie in the meeting itself, but in the content of the meeting,” Assad told journalists in Damascus after casting his vote in the Syrian parliamentary elections.

Earlier this month, Erdogan said that he “might” invite Assad to Ankara, in an effort to thaw Turkish-Syrian relations which have been severed for over a decade.

Assad asked whether the reference points for the meeting would be ending what he called “the causes of the problem, which are represented by supporting terrorism and withdrawing from Syrian territories.”

“This is the essence of the problem; there is no other reason. If there is no discussion about this essence, what does the meeting mean?” he asked.

When the war erupted in Syria, Erdogan, then prime minister of Turkey, slammed Assad for committing violence against his own people. Erdogan demanded the removal of the Syrian president from power and labeled him as a “terrorist.”

Turkey supported anti-Assad rebels in the early years of the civil war, especially in northwest Syria. However, when Russia intervened and threw its support behind Assad, Erdogan began opposing the growing Kurdish dominance in northern Syria.

Turkey has carried out three major military campaigns against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) since 2016 on the grounds that they are affiliated with Kurdish rebels in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The US-backed SDF has denied any formal ties with the PKK.

Syria has conditioned the normalization of ties on the withdrawal of Turkish troops from its territories.

Erdogan said late last month that there is no reason not to normalize relations with Assad. This remark came days after the Syrian president told a top Russian delegation of his “openness to all initiatives related to the relationship between Syria and Turkey, which are based on the sovereignty of the Syrian state over its entire territory,” according to a statement from his office released at the time.

Syrians rose up against the Assad regime in March 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

More than 13 million Syrians, half the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced since the start of the civil war, more than 6 million of whom are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to United Nations figures. Millions of Syrians are living in Turkey.