The Moscow-Ankara memorandum on northeast Syria lays the basis for avoiding any collision between the Turkish and Syrian military amid Ankara's push to drive the Kurds out of the border area, former Turkish foreign minister Yasar Yakis told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th October, 2019) The Moscow-Ankara memorandum on northeast Syria lays the basis for avoiding any collision between the Turkish and Syrian military amid Ankara's push to drive the Kurds out of the border area, former Turkish foreign minister Yasar Yakis told Sputnik.
Following the talks in Sochi on Tuesday, presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a memorandum to resolve the situation in northeast Syria in the wake of the Turkish cross-border offensive. Under the document, Russian military police and Syrian border guards commit themselves to facilitating the withdrawal of Kurdish militia from an 18-mile border zone. Russia and Turkey also agree on joint patrols in the area.
"This memorandum prepares the ground for avoiding military confrontation between Turkey and Syria, but peace cannot be guaranteed with this memorandum alone. It needs the cooperation of all actors of the Syrian theater," Yakis said.
According to the former minister, a military escalation is in the interest of neither Ankara nor Damascus, with their interests actually overlapping.
"Turkey says that its main target was to secure its borders against the Kurdish terrorists. Syria is also trying to subdue the Kurds. Therefore, they have converging interests," he pointed out.
The memorandum, in turn, paves the way for the destruction of the "advanced" infrastructure built by the Kurds in their de-facto autonomous region with the financial aid and "massive" arms supplies from the United States, Yakis concluded.
Turkey launched its offensive against Kurdish militia, viewed by Ankara as terrorists, on October 9 after its talks with the United States on a "safe zone" on the border collapsed and American troops started leaving the area. Kurds, abandoned by the United States, swiftly asked Damascus to deploy its troops to the northeast of the Arab republic to help repel the offensive.
