Turkey to Host Tripartite Summit on Syria

A preliminary tripartite meeting among the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey is expected to be held in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, next week to discuss the deteriorating situation in Syria, as well as to set the agenda for a summit on Syria by leaders of the three countries in April, radio Voice of America reports. 

Kazakhstan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday that diplomats would discuss mechanisms for ending the Syrian crisis at a meeting March 16 in Astana.

Meetings in Astana, which has hosted eight previous sessions, began in January 2017, as a parallel effort to the Geneva peace process initiated by the United Nations to help end the violence in Syria.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the foreign ministers of the "guarantor countries" would meet to discuss ways to reduce the "level of hostilities" in Syria, before the presidential summit in Istanbul in April.

Russia hosted a similar summit on Syria in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in November 2017. The leaders of the three countries — Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — agreed on taking the role of guarantors to maintain and strengthen the cease-fire in Syria at the time, although that effort that never fully came to fruition.

Without rejecting the Astana meeting, a U.S. State Department official told VOA that the U.S position on Syria had not changed.

"We continue to support the Geneva process and UNSCR [U.N. Security Council Resolution] 2254 as the means to achieve a political solution in Syria," the official told VOA.

Competing goals

The tripartite meeting and presidential summit come at a time when...