US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Turkey on Friday to discuss the developments in Syria after the toppling of strongman Bashar al-Assad, Agence France-Presse reported, citing a Turkish official on Wednesday.
“He will be in Turkey on Friday,” the official said of the visit which will come just five days after Assad’s unexpected ouster, pledging to share more details “as they are finalized.”
For more than a decade, Washington has sought to keep out of Syria’s political debacle, seeing no viable partner but the lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels is forcing a rethink.
There are around 900 US troops based in Syria since 2014 who have been working with Kurdish-led fighters that have battled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants jihadists in northeastern Syria.
But Washington’s support of the Kurdish forces has put it at odds with Ankara which sees them as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has led a decades-long bloody war against the Turkish state.