The leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran met for talks Thursday on how to work more closely together in Syria as Washington prepares to withdraw its troops from the war-torn country.
President Vladimir Putin hosted Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani for the talks in the southern city of Sochi.
Russia and Iran – who both back the regime of President Bashar al-Assad – and rebel supporter Turkey have positioned themselves as the key foreign players in Syria’s long-running war.
The eight-year conflict has left more than 360,000 dead.
Meeting with Erdogan ahead of the summit, Putin said he was confident the talks would give a ‘new impulse’ to efforts to resolve the conflict.
‘We have done a lot together, we have come a long way,’ Putin said.
The talks came as Kurdish-led forces battled to expel Islamic State group fighters from the small town of Baghouz in eastern Syria, the last bastion of their ‘caliphate’ that once controlled large parts of the country.
A US-led international coalition is backing the offensive but President Donald Trump has said Washington plans to pull all of its troops out of Syria.
At Thursday’s meeting with Putin, Erdogan said the planned US pull-out made it more important for other foreign powers to work together in Syria.
‘The US withdrawal decision is one of the most important tests ahead of us. The uncertainty over how the decision will be implemented remains. It is very very important that we work together in this new situation,’ he said.
As a sign of cooperation, he said Russia and Turkey had agreed to start ‘joint patrols’ in order to contain ‘radical groups’ in Idlib province, a northwestern region of Syria still under rebel control.
He said there had been a ‘military agreement’ on the joint patrols but provided no further details.
Erdogan also called for the removal of the Kurdish forces battling IS in northeastern Syria.
‘Syria’s territorial integrity cannot be ensured and that region cannot be returned to its real owners before PYD-YPG is cleared from Manbij and the east of Euphrates,’ Erdogan said.
Meanwhile, Islamic State group jihadists using tunnels and suicide bombers were mounting a desperate defence Thursday of their last square kilometre in eastern Syria.
Kurdish-led forces closed in on the small town of Baghouz where IS fighters and their relatives were hunkered down and met hundreds of famished and dishevelled people turning themselves in.
‘The fighting is fierce,’ said Adnan Afrin, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-Arab outfit that has spearheaded the campaign against IS with backing from a US-led coalition.
‘There is significant resistance,’ he told AFP in Al-Omar oil field, the main staging base for the SDF’s offensive against the very last shred of the original IS ‘caliphate’.
The few hundred fighters of various nationalities holding out in their last bastion by the Iraqi border have launched bruising counter-attacks in recent days, Afrin said.
The jihadists are clinging to about one square kilometre in the town’s built-up area, as well as to an adjacent camp, where a number of civilians are believed to be gathered.
Afrin said it was impossible to provide accurate figures but he estimated the total number of fighters, men and women, at around 1,000.
