Turkey’s top diplomat travelled to Damascus on Thursday as Ankara said foreign fighters must be expelled from Syria, after an agreement spearheaded by the war-torn country’s new authorities to disband armed groups.
Flanked by Turkey’s defence minister and its spy chief, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was paying a “working visit” to Syria, the ministry said in a statement, without further details.
Fidan was due to meet with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the Islamist HTS group that overthrew Bashar al-Assad in December, according to state-run TRT television.
It is his second visit to Damascus after he became the first foreign minister to travel there, two weeks after Assad’s ouster.
The visit comes three days after Syria’s new authorities forged an agreement with the head of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate the autonomous Kurdish administration into the national government.
The move seeks to disband armed groups and establish government control over the entire country after more than 13 years of civil war.
The SDF, seen as essential in the fight against Islamic State (IS) jihadists, is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Ankara views the YPG as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an outlawed group dominated by ethnic Kurds in Turkey that has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984.
“As Turkey, we remain determined to fight against terrorism,” a Turkish defence ministry source said.
“There’s no change in our expectations for an end to terrorist activities in Syria, for terrorists to lay down their weapons and for foreign terrorists to be removed from Syria,” the source added.
Turkey, which has pressed Syria’s new leaders to address the issue of the YPG’s control over substantial parts of northern Syria, is closely watching the process of integrating the SDF into the Syrian government.
“We’ll see how the agreement is to be implemented… in the field,” the defence ministry source said. “We will closely follow its positive or negative consequences.”
Since 2016, Turkey has carried out a series of military ground operations in Syria to force Kurdish forces away from its border.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that the full implementation of the agreement would serve peace and security, and benefit all Syrians.
“We see every effort to cleanse Syria of terrorism as a step in the right direction,” he said.
The United States — which had allied with the SDF to battle the Islamic State group, to the dismay of Turkey — also welcomed the agreement in Syria.
Turkey will host a regional summit in April to discuss anti-IS operations, a Turkish diplomatic source told AFP.
The agreement comes two weeks after jailed PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan called for the group to lay down its weapons and disband.
The PKK, designated as a “terror” group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, announced a ceasefire after Ocalan’s historic call, saying: “None of our forces will carry out any armed operation unless they are attacked.”
Ankara has said that if the promises are not kept, Turkish forces will continue their current anti-PKK military operations.
