Turkish Airlines has announced the resumption of flights to Damascus, Syria, after a halt of over a decade, marking a significant milestone in the normalization of relations between Turkey and Syria.
The announcement, made on Wednesday, follows a visit by a delegation from Syria’s new Turkey-backed administration. Bilal Eksi, CEO of the national carrier, confirmed that the airline will operate three weekly flights to the Syrian capital starting January 23, underscoring a major development in regional diplomacy and transportation.
The decision comes shortly after Syria’s new foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, held talks in Ankara with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other senior officials. Al-Shibani represents Syria’s new de facto authorities, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group that recently overthrew President Bashar Assad, ending his family’s decades-long rule.
From 2011 until Assad’s ouster, Syria’s uprising and subsequent civil war resulted in an estimated 500,000 deaths. With the new leadership in Syria keen to re-establish diplomatic relations with both regional and global powers, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan hinted at plans to reopen Turkey’s Consulate in the Syrian city of Aleppo, as he spoke alongside al-Shibani at a joint news conference.
Turkey had already announced last month its decision to reopen its embassy in Damascus after a 12-year closure. During the press conference, Fidan also called for the lifting of international sanctions on Syria, emphasizing the need to support essential public services and aid in the reconstruction of the war-torn country.
al-Shibani said, “If sanctions are lifted, the country’s normalization process will accelerate, and conditions will be created that will enable millions of Syrians to return to their country,” Fidan said.“We came to establish a new country, to rebuild it,”.
“We will work with all our might to ensure that it will be a country that has the rights of all its people and is integrated with the region and the world.” He also pledged that Syria’s new rulers would safeguard the “territorial unity of Syria” and prevent any threat to Turkey from Kurdish groups in Syria, including the YPG or the People’s Protection Units, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have U.S. backing.
Ankara claims the Syrian Kurdish groups are allied against Turkey with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey since 1984. The conflict has spread beyond Turkey’s borders into Iraq and Syria, and has killed tens of thousands of people.The PKK is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
(With AP Inputs)