Turkish foreign minister hosts Syrian counterpart in Ankara; defence ministers sign military cooperation memorandum of understanding.
Published On 13 Aug 2025
Turkiye has said that Israel and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) must stop threatening the security and stability of Syria as Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan hosted his Syrian counterpart Asaad al-Shaibani in Ankara.
Speaking at a joint news conference on Wednesday, Fidan accused Israel and the SDF of wilfully undermining the country’s recovery efforts after the devastation of a 14-year civil war and the ouster of longtime leader Bashar al-Assad last December by a lightning rebel offensive.
Fidan said Israel had “fuelled certain difficulties” in Syria and warned that Israeli security “cannot be achieved through undermining the security of your neighbours”.
“To the contrary, you should make sure your neighbouring countries are prosperous and secure,” he said. “If you try to destabilise these countries, if you take steps to that end, this could trigger other crises in the region.”
Al-Shaibani said Israel’s actions “undermine the security of our citizens,” adding that “certain countries want Syria to disintegrate based on ideologies, based on ethnicity, and obviously we are against all these efforts”.
Concurrently, the defence ministers of Turkiye and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding on military training and consultancy after talks in Ankara on Wednesday, Turkiye’s Defence Ministry said. The countries had been negotiating a comprehensive military cooperation agreement for months since al-Assad’s fall.
Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s fledgling government has been beset by heavy fallout from sectarian violence that broke out on July 13 in the southern province of Suwayda between Bedouin and Druze fighters. Government troops were deployed to quell the conflict.
The bloodshed worsened, and Israel carried out strikes on Syrian troops and also bombed the heart of the capital, Damascus, under the pretext of protecting the Druze. Israel had been regularly bombarding Syria and staging ground excursions into Syria since al-Assad’s ouster, saying it was targeting weapons sites and branding the leaders of the new government as “extremists”.
In the meantime, ongoing eruptions of violence between Syrian government forces and the SDF continued