MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th January, 2023) Tehran welcomes the recent talks between the Turkish and Syrian defense ministers and calls for a more active cooperation in the Astana format to successfully resolve issues between the two countries, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Friday.
In December 2022, the defense ministers of Russia, Syria and Turkey held trilateral talks in Moscow to discuss ways to resolve the Syrian crisis. The negotiations marked the first official meeting between the Turkish and Syrian defense chiefs in 11 years. In the same month, Ankara suggested that the Turkish, Syrian and Russian foreign ministers held a meeting in February 2023, possibly in a third country.
"We are satisfied with the Syrian-Turkish talks and welcome the path of a dialogue and negotiations to resolve issues between these two countries," Amirabdollahian was quoted by the Fars news agency as saying during a joint press conference with his Lebanese counterpart, Abdallah Bou Habib, in Beirut.
The Iranian minister added that cooperation within the Astana format on Syria, which Russia, Iran and Turkey take part in, should be intensified so as to improve the relations between Ankara and Damascus.
The war in Syria has been going on since 2011, with President Bashar Assad's forces fighting various armed insurgent groups. Since 2016, the Turkish armed forces have been also conducting air and ground operations in Syria against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which wants to establish a Kurdish autonomy in Turkey. Damascus has repeatedly called the presence of Turkish forces on the Syrian border illegal and urged Ankara to withdraw its troops.
In 2017, Russia, Turkey and Iran launched a mediation group on the Syrian settlement in Astana. In January 2018, the Russian city of Sochi hosted a congress of the Syrian national dialogue, the first such attempt since the start of the conflict to gather an inclusive pool of Syrian political forces. The main result of the Congress was the decision to create a Constitutional Committee, which operates in Geneva and whose main task is to prepare a constitutional reform in Syria.
