Assad said Syria’s main goals in the upcoming talks are Turkish withdrawal from Syrian territory and the fight against terrorism…reports Asian Lite News
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said that the Syria-Turkey normalisation talks should work toward the goals of Turkish withdrawal from Syria and counter-terrorism, media reported.
During his meeting with visiting Iranian Foreign Minister’s senior advisor Ali Asghar Khaji, Assad said Syria’s main goals in the upcoming talks are Turkish withdrawal from Syrian territory and the fight against terrorism, state news agency SANA reported on Monday.
The two sides must find ways to realise these goals in cooperation with the Russian and Iranian sides, the President added.
For his part, Asghar Khaji, an advisor on special political affairs, lauded Syria for normalisation with some other Arab countries, Xinhua news agency reported.
Iran and Russia have been mediating normalisation talks between Syria and Turkey recently, arranging several meetings on the level of Defence Ministers and Foreign Ministers.
Since late last year when Russia and Iran were paving the way for the Syria-Turkey negotiations, the Syrian government has prioritised the withdrawal of the Turkish forces from Syria as a prerequisite for the normalisation.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Interior Ministry announced that a criminal ring that trafficked poverty-stricken women had been dismantled in the countryside of the capital Damascus.
In a statement, the Ministry on Sunday said its Criminal Security Branch, after investigation and monitoring, busted a large human trafficking network and arrested all its members, adding they would soon be tried in court.
The network had trafficked Syrian women out of the country in cooperation with “people running parallel networks within one of the neighbouring countries,” the Ministry added, without detailing further as quoted by Xinhua news agency report.
In 2020, the branch’s chief in Damascus, Walid Abdelali, said the crime was born out of the crisis in Syria, according to the al-Watan online newspaper.
He said those criminals took advantage of the poverty of some people to dupe them with so-called employment opportunities, thus trafficking them internally and sometimes externally.
