Foreign ministers from Russia, Syria and Turkey will meet in the second half of January after last week holding the highest-level gathering since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said late on Saturday that he had a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to discuss the timing and venue of the next meeting, according to state-run Anadolu news agency. The stepped-up diplomacy comes after a recent rapprochement between Turkey and its southern neighbor.
Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and his Syrian counterpart Ali Mahmoud Abbas held talks in Moscow on Wednesday hosted by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The Turkish and Syrian intelligence chiefs also took part. The discussions focused on the civil war and collaboration against “all terrorist groups” in the Middle East state, Turkey said, in a thinly-veiled reference to Kurdish militias in Syria. Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the meeting focused on combating “extremist groups on Syrian territory.”
