Astana

The crucial Syria summit, which will bring Syria's government and rebel fighters to a negotiating table for the first time after nearly six years of war, following 23 days of cease-fire, is set to start in Kazakhstan's capital on Jan. 23. 

The U.S. State Department said on Jan. 21 it will not send a delegation to attend talks on Syria in the Kazakh capital Astana next week due to the immediate demands of the transition of power in Washington. The State Department's acting spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. would be represented at the talks by U.S. Ambassador to Kazakhstan George Krol.

Two very important developments regarding the Syrian conflict: Russia signed an agreement that prolongs its presence in the country and increases its forces and its installations there and Turkey seems to accept for the first time Assad on power in a post-solution Syria.

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Turkey will contact the new Donald Trump administration over the weekend to focus on "intense issues" such as Syria and the upcoming meeting in Astana, along with bilateral relations, presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın has said. 

In the first days of Donald Trump era, the U.S. will have to deal with the Syria crisis as its first foreign policy problem, as it looks like it will be joining the Astana talks on Jan. 23.

Prospective participants in peace talks scheduled to take place in the Kazakh capital of Astana were making preparations ahead of Jan. 23, the set date for the start of the negotiations that were brokered by Russia and Turkey.

Russia has invited the U.S. to take part in the upcoming intra-Syrian talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana on Jan. 23, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Jan. 19. 

"The U.S. have already been invited," Lavrov told reporters in Moscow, according to state-run Anadolu Agency. 

Nearly 180,000 Syrians have been born in Turkey over the last five years, according to Turkey's Health Ministry.

A total of 177,568 Syrians mothers - refugees of the country's bloody civil war - gave birth in Turkey between April 2011 and September 2016, according to the ministry's figures.

Iranian officials said Jan. 18 that they were strongly opposed to the United States joining Syrian peace talks in Kazakhstan next week, local media reported.

"We are hostile to their presence and we have not invited them," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said late Jan. 17, according to the Tasnim news agency, AFP reported.  

Vladimir Putin has dismissed the dossier published last week about alleged links between Moscow and Donald Trump, describing the people who ordered it as “worse than prostitutes”.