Turkey’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan (C) and Turkish FM Mevlut Cavusoglu (R) in Moscow, Russia, January 13, 2020. Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry via Ekurd
ANKARA,— Turkish and Syrian heads of intelligence, Hakan Fidan and Ali Mamlouk met in Moscow on Monday, in the first official contact in years despite Ankara’s long-standing hostility to President Bashar al-Assad, a senior Turkish official and Syrian news agency SANA said.
Both sides have said there have been intelligence contacts, but this is the first explicit acknowledgement of such a senior meeting.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan backs Syrian Islamic fighters who fought to topple Assad during Syria’s eight-year civil war. Erdogan described Assad as a terrorist and called for him to be driven from power, which earlier in the war had appeared possible.
But Assad’s allies Russia and Iran helped turn the conflict round, and with U.S. forces now withdrawing from Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) in northeast Syria, Assad’s Russian-backed troops are sweeping back into the Kurdish region just as Turkish troops move in from the north.
Turkey’s intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, and his Syrian counterpart discussed the ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib, and possible coordination against the Kurdish presence in northern Syria.
The discussions included “the possibility of working together against YPG, the terrorist organization PKK’s Syrian component, in the East of the Euphrates river,” a Turkish official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
On October 9, 2019 Turkey and its Syrian Islamic militant allies launched the offensive against the worldwide-respected Kurdish Kurdish YPG forces, the de facto army of the Syrian autonomous Kurdish region. After seizing a strip of land inside Syria 120 km long and around 30 km wide running from the Kurdish town of Serêkaniyê to Girê Spî.
SANA news agency said Syria’s intelligence chief called on Turkey to fully adhere to the sovereignty of Syria, its independence and territorial integrity as well as the immediate and full withdrawal from the whole Syrian territory.
In 2019, Turkey and Russia signed a deal, dubbed the Sochi agreement, under which Syrian and Russian forces deployed in Syrian Kurdistan to remove Kurdish YPG fighters and their weapons from the border with Turkey under a deal, which both Moscow and Ankara hailed as a triumph.
Despite backing opposing sides in Syria’s conflict, Ankara and Moscow have grown closer, their ties strengthened by joint energy projects and Turkey’s purchase of Russian air defenses – to the anger of its NATO ally the United States.
Turkey and Russia have cooperated more closely on Syria since agreeing two years ago to work along with Assad’s other main ally, Iran, to contain the fighting.
Rights groups and displaced Kurdish families have accused Ankara-backed Syrian Arab Islamic militants of executions, home confiscations and looting in that border strip.
The monitor said in October that more than 300,000 civilians, mostly Kurds, had been displaced by the assault, calling it one of the largest upheavals since Syria’s civil war began in 2011.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s eight-year war.
In 2013, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of foreigners suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children, during the battle against IS in Syria and are being held in by Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan.
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