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President Mohamed Morsi’s assistant on Foreign Relations and International Cooperation, Essam El-Haddad, left for Turkey on Monday morning to convey a message from the president to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to state-owned Al-Ahram, Morsi is looking to restart the Syrian Quartet Initiative.
The move comes just two days after car bombs in a Turkish border town left 46 people dead. The Turkish government blamed a “Marxist terror organisation” which “is directly related to the [Syrian] regime”, the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoğlu said in a press conference on Saturday.
In the press conference Davutoğlu called on the international community to intervene against the ever-growing regional threat of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.
Damascus denied any involvement in the attack.
Iran, one of the four members of Morsi’s Syrian Quartet Initiative, is the Syrian regime’s biggest ally. Iran accused Syrian rebel forces of using chemical weapons, a move which the Iranian foreign minister condemned on Sunday in an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel. The foreign minister urged the international community to adopt proper measures to prevent these groups from using chemical weapons.
Morsi’s Syrian Quartet Initiative was proposed in August 2012 during the Islamic Summit held in Mecca. The Quartet is comprised on Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Egypt has attempted to play a key role in negotiations surrounding Syria in the region. Unlike the United States-led attempts at finding a solution, Egypt has involved three key regional players including Syria’s most important ally Iran, and held separate talks with Russia.
Up till now there have been no concrete results on the ground from the Quartet Initiative, while Saudi Arabia has failed to participate in all but one meeting.
