The Russian, Iranian and Turkish foreign ministers met today in Turkey to discuss Syria, just days before a trilateral summit crucial for the de-escalation process in this country. Russian Sergei Lavrov, Iranian Javad Zarif and Turkish Mevlu Cavusoglu met in Antalya, in southern Turkey, for a closed-door meeting.
The purpose of this meeting is to lay the foundations for the Soci summit, which will be held next Wednesday, and which will see the presidents of the three countries present: the Russian Vladimir Putin, the Iranian Hassan Rohani and the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Moscow, Tehran and Ankara have already made an agreement to reduce the intensity of the fighting to prepare the ground for a political solution to the Syrian conflict, which since March 2011 has claimed more than 330.000 victims and resulted in millions of refugees.
This agreement, reached in the Kazakh capital of Astana, made it possible to create "de-escalation zones" where the fighting should be stopped. In this context, Turkey has deployed troops in the rebel province of Idleb in the north-west of the country. Russia and Iran support Syrian President Bashar al Assad, while Turkey supports rebel groups, even if recently Ankara has muted this aid, limiting itself rather to taking action against the Kurds.