Turkey will never compromise on the Sochi deal on embattled Idlib, Syria and it expects the deal to be implemented, said President Erdoğan.
Speaking to reporters while returning from Azerbaijan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, “We want whatever the Sochi deal contains. We cannot compromise on this issue, and whatever is necessary needs to be done.”
On his phone calls last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron, in which the leaders agreed on a meeting on Idlib for March 5, Erdoğan said the venue of the meeting “will probably be Istanbul.”
He said whether the meetings would be bilateral or quadrilateral would be agreed on later.
Since Turkey and Russia reached a deal on Idlib in 2018 under which acts of aggression are supposed to be prohibited there, over 1,300 civilians have been killed in the de-escalation zone.
Following intense attacks by the Assad regime and its allies, over a million Syrians have flocked towards the Turkish border.
Since the eruption of the bloody civil war in Syria in 2011, Turkey has taken in some 3.7 million fleeing Syrians, making Turkey the world’s top refugee-hosting country.
‘Turkey’s presence in Syria based on 1998 Adana deal’
Rebuffing critics who call Turkey’s presence in northern Syria – across the Turkish border – an “invasion,” Erdoğan pointed to 1998 Adana Agreement between Turkey and the then-Syrian government.
“Turkey is here [in Syria] based on the Adana deal,” he said. “What is the process in Adana deal? You will follow the terror groups wherever they go. This is what Turkey is doing, and right now we are going after the terror organizations,” Erdoğan said, adding that these terror groups are PKK, YPG, PYD, Daesh/ISIS and other terror groups.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/-turkey-will-never-compromise-on-sochi-deal-for-syria-/1745754