ANKARA: The deputy foreign ministers of Russia, Turkiye, Iran, and Syria will meet in Moscow next week for low-level talks ahead of a long-planned meeting between the nations’ four foreign ministers.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkish Foreign Minister, said that his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian asked if Iran could join the three-way negotiations as a fourth party, and Ankara agreed.
“Astana is the only surviving format (to address) Syria anyway,” Mevlut said at a joint news conference with Amir-Abdollahian.
He said that “a meeting at the level of foreign ministers could be held at a later stage, at a time that we all see fit”
In a joint statement after the April 25-26, 2019, meeting in Astana, Iran, Turkiye, and Russia reaffirmed their “strong commitment to the sovereignty, unity, independence, and territorial integrity” of Syria and the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.
Talks under four-way format to help resolve conflicts
Abdollahian said Iran was willing to help resolve the disagreements between Damascus and Ankara under the four-way format, especially regarding the withdrawal of the Turkish army from northern Syria.
Turkiye and Iran have taken opposing stances on Syria since the outbreak of the tussle. This comes a week after the Russian Ambassador to Iraq, Elbrus Kutrashev, said during Irbil Forum 2023 that reconciliation between Turkiye and Syria was “high time”.
Russia sponsored a normalization path between Turkish and Syrian defence ministers and intelligence chiefs in Russia in December in a bid to facilitate the rapprochement process between the two nations, marking the first high-level meeting since the war in Syria began in 2011.
But Iran announced its uneasiness about being sidelined from this meeting and emphasised the significant of a political solution in Syria. The defence ministers discussed during the meeting, counter-terrorism efforts in Syria and agreed to continue their three-way meetings to encourage regional stability.
