Syria’s ousted leader Bashar al-Assad is “probably outside Syria.” This was stated this Sunday by the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, although he refused to make a specific statement or give more details.
“I’m not sure. I can’t comment on this. I think he is outside Syria,” Fidan said at a press conference in Doha, when asked about Al Assad’s whereabouts. Likewise, he has indicated that in recent days there was no communication between Damascus and Ankarasince despite Turkish efforts to warn the regime of its weakness “there was no response.”
The minister, who held a meeting on Saturday in the Qatari capital with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and with the Iranian, Abbas Araqchi, has asserted that Türkiye had been watching the collapse for some time of the Al Assad regime and tried to prevent it without success.
“In the last two months we tried to contact Al Assad and everything failed. “We knew that something was going to happen and we knew how the pressure was increasing, because of the refugees and the economic problems.”Fidan said: “The regime was slowly crumbling and collapsing, and we really wanted to do something to stop it. But the short answer is: no, we didn’t talk to them because there was no contact.”
Similarly, Fidan has criticized that, since the war “froze” in 2016 thanks to the Astana agreements, a process in which Turkey, Russia and Iran participated, the regime “I could take advantage of this valuable time” to resolve the conflict, but “he didn’t.”
“All groups” must coordinate
“There was a slow collapse and this explains why Aleppo fell, as well as the other cities, almost without a shot being fired,” commented the Turkish minister. Fidan added that now, “all groups in Syria” They must coordinate to rebuild the country, but he has warned that Türkiye will monitor to prevent “terrorist groups such as Daesh (Islamic State) or the PKK from taking advantage of the situation.”
By the name of the PKK, an acronym for the banned Kurdistan Workers Party, Türkiye’s Kurdish guerrilla, the Turkish government often refers to to the Syrian Kurdish militiasthe People’s Protection Units (YPG), which it considers simply a local branch of the PKK.
“We are in contact with our American friends, they know how sensitive we are about the YPG-PKK issue and they know that We will react immediately to any threat. We will have some conversations about this with the next US Administration,” the minister concluded.
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