Turkey’s top diplomat, Hakan Fidan, said Tuesday Ankara would reopen its embassy in Damascus when conditions allow, following the ouster of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Agence France-Presse reported.
At a gathering of Turkish diplomats in Ankara, Fidan was asked whether Turkey was planning to reopen its embassy in the Syrian capital, which closed a year into the civil war that began in 2011.
“We will look into it. We’ll wait for the right conditions,” he told delegates.
The embassy closed on March 26, 2012 due to the deteriorating security situation and amid calls by the Turkish government for Assad to step down.
Turkey originally aimed to topple Assad’s regime when the Syrian civil war erupted with the violent suppression of peaceful protesters in 2011, backing rebels calling for his ouster. More recently, Ankara shifted focus to preventing what Erdoğan in 2019 called a “terror corridor” from opening up in northern Syria.
Earlier this year, Turkey attempted to have normalization talks with the Assad government, but its efforts were unsuccessful as Damascus demanded the complete withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Syria as a precondition.
Assad hinted that a halt of Turkey’s “support” for terrorism in Syria and its withdrawal from Syrian territory would be “reference points” for a meeting with Erdoğan.
He accused Turkey of supporting “terrorism” due to its backing of opposition groups in the country.