Washington told Turkey that it will participate in fresh Syria talks being organized by Moscow, Ankara and Tehran this month but the level of its participation is unclear, President Tayyip Erdoğan's spokesman İbrahim Kalın said on Friday.
On Thursday, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said that US officials would be invited to the January 23 peace talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. "The United States should definitely be invited, and that is what we agreed with Russia. Nobody can ignore the role of the United States. And this is a principled position by Turkey," he said.
Speaking to reporters at a roundtable in Ankara, İbrahim Kalın said that Turkish government still believes a united and peaceful Syria is impossible with President Bashar al-Assad but wants to proceed "step-by-step" and see the outcome of planned peace talks in Astana.
"Our position on Assad is clear. We don't believe that a united, peaceful Syria will be possible with Assad remaining in power. But we will see how Astana talks go, we want to go step by step at this point," Kalın said.
