Turkish foreign minister hosts Syrian counterpart in Ankara; defence ministers sign military cooperation memorandum of understanding.
Turkiye has said that Israel and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) must stop threatening the security and stability of Syria as Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan hosted his Syrian counterpart Asaad al-Shaibani in Ankara.
Speaking at a joint news conference on Wednesday, Fidan accused Israel and the SDF of wilfully undermining the country’s recovery efforts after the devastation of a 14-year civil war and the ouster of longtime leader Bashar al-Assad last December by a lightning rebel offensive.
Fidan said Israel had “fuelled certain difficulties” in Syria and warned that Israeli security “cannot be achieved through undermining the security of your neighbours”.
“To the contrary, you should make sure your neighbouring countries are prosperous and secure,” he said. “If you try to destabilise these countries, if you take steps to that end, this could trigger other crises in the region.”
Al-Shaibani said Israel’s actions “undermine the security of our citizens,” adding that “certain countries want Syria to disintegrate based on ideologies, based on ethnicity, and obviously we are against all these efforts”.
Concurrently, the defence ministers of Turkiye and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding on military training and consultancy after talks in Ankara on Wednesday, Turkiye’s Defence Ministry said. The countries had been negotiating a comprehensive military cooperation agreement for months since al-Assad’s fall.
Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s fledgling government has been beset by heavy fallout from sectarian violence that broke out on July 13 in the southern province of Suwayda between Bedouin and Druze fighters. Government troops were deployed to quell the conflict.
The bloodshed worsened, and Israel carried out strikes on Syrian troops and also bombed the heart of the capital, Damascus, under the pretext of protecting the Druze. Israel had been regularly bombarding Syria and staging ground excursions into Syria since al-Assad’s ouster, saying it was targeting weapons sites and branding the leaders of the new government as “extremists”.
In the meantime, ongoing eruptions of violence between Syrian government forces and the SDF continued on Tuesday in Aleppo province in the northwest.
The clashes cast further doubt over an integration deal signed in March by the armed group and Syria’s Damascus as part of efforts to reunite the country, devastated and divided by the ruinous war that saw hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced.
The Defence Ministry said on Tuesday that the SDF must abide by that accord and stop targeting government forces, warning that “the continuation of these actions will lead to new consequences”, the SANA state news agency reported.
However, the March agreement does not specify how the SDF would be merged into Syria’s armed forces. The group has previously said its forces must join as a bloc, while the government wants its fighters to join as individuals.
Syria’s government said last week that it would not take part in planned meetings with the SDF in Paris amid mounting tensions. But the foreign minister and a senior official in the country’s Kurdish administration reportedly met on Tuesday in Damascus, sources from both sides told the AFP news agency.
The SDF was the main force allied with the United States in Syria during fighting that defeated ISIL (ISIS) in 2019.
On Saturday, the group accused government-backed factions of attacking areas in northeastern Syria more than 22 times. It said that it had exercised restraint during such “aggressions”, but that the continuation of attacks “threatens mutual trust and undermines understandings”.
Fidan accused the SDF of trying to turn instability in Syria into an “opportunity for themselves.”
Ankara views the SDF with hostility as the group is spearheaded by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that recently began disarmament as part of a peace process with Turkiye after more than 40 years of fighting in a conflict that killed more than 40,000 people. The SDF has said it is not party to the deal between Ankara and the PKK.
“At this point, we are beginning to witness developments that we are finding increasingly difficult to tolerate,“ Fidan said. ”The upper echelons of the YPG need to stop playing for time because the chaos they’re waiting for [in Syria] will not take place, and even if it does, it will not be to their advantage.” Fidan said.
He added: “They shouldn’t take us for fools. We have good intentions, but that doesn’t mean we will turn a blind eye to your mischievous or devious ways.”