Ankara’s summit on Monday between Russia, Turkey, and Iran highlighted the need to find a lasting truce in Syria, according to Reuters.
The leaders of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose governments have been involved in the fighting in Syria’s civil war since 2011, announced in a joint statement that they are considering establishing a committee to rewrite Syria’s Constitution as part of a political solution to the conflict.
The constitutional committee should include pro-government, opposition, and independent members in the talks which will be held in Geneva as soon as possible, said Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ankara’s summit was the fifth trilateral meeting among the countries which stand on opposing sides of the conflict in Syria. Russia and Iran have been involved in the Syrian civil war and support the Syrian government against the rebels. However, Turkey and the United States supported different rebel factions.
Although the summit has shown the disagreements between the three countries, the meeting focused on easing the soaring tensions in the Idlib governorate, the last remaining territory held by the rebels against the Syrian government.
“Of course, we are worried about the situation in the northeast of Syria, where sleeping cells of Islamic State (IS) are emerging,” said Putin. A few minutes after, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that Kurdish militant groups are the only threat in northern Syria.
However, in the summit, Erdogan focused only on the planned safe zone by using Turkish-US joint land patrols. He said that the safe zone could host up to three million refugees currently living in Turkey if the safe zone was extended from Turkey’s border to Raqqa and Deir Al-Zor in eastern Syria. However, neither Putin nor the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani commented on this issue.
Moreover, Rouhani said before the summit that a political solution is the only solution to the crisis and called on the US to immediately withdraw its troops from Syria.
