Turkey negotiating with Assad regime ‘out of question’

Turkish Presidential Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin holds a press conference in Ankara, Turkey on 4 January 2018 [Halil Sağırkaya/Anadolu Agency]

A spokesman for the Turkish presidency, Ibrahim Kalin, has said that Turkey negotiating with the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad “is not an option”.

“An oppressor who spills the blood of his own people cannot contribute to establishing a future for Syria” Kalin said in an interview on Turkish CNN yesterday.

The official was answering a question on whether Turkey would agree to a transitional phase that includes Assad.

Read: Turkey will not allow arming Kurds in Syria, army chief says

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.