At the Tehran summit on Tuesday, Erdogan’s goals “were not achieved after talks and views expressed by the friends, the Iranian and the Russian,” the Syrian foreign minister said.
The Syrian foreign minister Faisal Mekdad, visiting Iran, said today that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been unable to get Iran or Russia’s support for a attack on Syria which threatens to unleash from May.
The Syrian official made this statement the day after the tripartite summit held yesterday, Tuesday, in Tehran with the presidents of Turkey, Russia Vladimir Putin and of Iran Ibrahim Raishi.
Russia, Iran and Turkey are major players in the conflict that erupted in Syria in 2011, with Tehran and Moscow backing the Bashar al-Assad regime and Turkey backing the rebels.
At the Tehran summit on Tuesday, Erdogan’s goals “were not achieved after talks and views expressed by the friends, the Iranian and the Russian,” Mekdad told a news conference in Tehran with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian .
At the summit, President Erdogan, who wants to establish a 30km buffer zone along the Syrian border, expressed his determination to launch a new military operation “soon” against Kurdish forces controlling the area.
“It must be clear to everyone that there is no place in the region for separatist terrorist movements and their accomplices. We will soon continue our battle against terrorist organizations,” warned the Turkish president, who considers Kurdish fighters “terrorists”.
In a meeting with the Turkish president, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had underlined his country’s opposition to a Turkish operation in Syria, calling it “harmful” to the region and calling for a settlement through dialogue between Ankara, Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.
Moscow had also called on Ankara to refrain from such an operation in Syria.
In their joint statement at the end of the summit, the three countries implicitly support Ankara in its fight against the Kurds, expressing “(their) will to oppose separatist aspirations that could undermine the sovereignty and integrity of Syria” and to threaten the security of neighboring countries.
For the head of Syrian diplomacy, any Turkish invasion would cause “another form of conflict” between the two countries.
His Iranian counterpart, on the other hand, spoke of the need to withdraw US forces deployed in the Syrian areas east of the Euphrates, echoing a call made by Ayatollah Khamenei on Tuesday during a meeting with President Putin.
“The presence of American armed forces east of the Euphrates is one of the problems of the region,” said Amir-Abdollahian.
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