Turkey and Iran call for cease fire in Syria

Visiting Tehran for a ministerial meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and his Iranian counterpart Mohamad Javad Zarif set out their common position in favor of a cease fire in Syria. According to them, there is no need to wait for the Geneva 2 conference, on January 22th 2014, in order to put an end to the hostilities.

This declaration attests to the complete turnabout of the Turkish stance to which we had pointed out after M. Davutoğlu’s trip to Iraq  [1]. Henceforth, Ankara will relinquish its posture as historic leader of the Sunni Muslims to adopt that of a regional consensual power.

This also marks an about-face on the part of Iran, which now considers that fighting Takfiri terrorism is less important than pursuing its reconciliation with Washington and relaunching its economy.

Unfortunately, the cease-fire talk was contradicted by the testimony of a truck driver who was arrested while transporting one thousand mortar shells and a dozen launchers. He claimed to have picked up his cargo near a Turkish police station that could not not have been in the know. This testimony was sharply denied by the Turkish Minister of the Interior, Muammer Güler. It nevertheless corroborates several other testimonies throughout the past three years as well as the complaints filed by Syrian citizens before Turkish courts.

The common Turkish and Iranian declaration is anything but spontaneous. It was originally contemplated when M. Davutoğlu and Zarif met, on November 1rst, during the regional conference on disarmament, and prepared in the event of a successful outcome of the Iran-US negotiations. Both men had already met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, on September 23rd 2013 in New York.