TUNIS: Syria’s "natural place" is within the Arab League, Tunisia’s foreign minister said on Saturday, ahead of the organisation’s annual summit in Tunis in March.
"Syria is an Arab state, and its natural place is within the Arab League," Khemaies Jhinaoui said during a news conference with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, who is on a tour of North African countries.
The Arab League suspended Syria’s membership in November 2011 as the death toll in the country’s civil war mounted.
"The question of Syria returning to the Arab League does not depend on Tunisia but on the Arab League," Jhinaoui said.
"The foreign ministers (of member states) will decide on this subject," he added. "What interests us is Syria’s stability and security."
Persistent divisions between the Arab League’s member states have worked against Syria’s readmission.
Russia’s intervention in Syria’s war since 2015 in favour of President Bashar al-Assad has turned the tide of the conflict in the regime’s favour.
The United Arab Emirates reopened its embassy in Damascus in December, the same month Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir made the first visit of any Arab leader to the Syrian capital since the start of the war.
But Qatar earlier this month rejected normalising ties with Assad.
Lavrov backed overtures to readmit Syria.
"As we have discussed in Algeria and Morocco over the past few days, we would like Tunis to also support Syria’s return to the Arab family, the Arab League," he said in Tunis.
Lavrov, who has also visited Morocco on his tour, said that Tunisia and Russia agreed to ramp up "anti-terror cooperation".
In reference to Franco-Italian differences on Libya, he said: "We must harmonise the efforts of outside mediators seeking a settlement to the Libyan conflict.
"This must be done under the sponsorship of the United Nations and taking into account the points of view of neighbours such as Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt."
Russia’s foreign minister, winding up his North Africa visit, also met Tunisia’s president and prime minister on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government on Saturday condemned Turkey’s military presence in northern Syria as a violation of a 1998 protocol between the two countries.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted the Adana Protocol gives his country the right to intervene militarily in the neighbouring country.
Turkey and its Syrian rebel proxies control part of northern Syria, and Ankara has repeatedly threatened another military operation against Kurdish fighters on its southern border.
On Saturday, the foreign ministry in Damascus accused Ankara of repeatedly breaching the Adana deal throughout Syria’s eight-year war.
"Since 2011, the Turkish regime has violated and continues to violate this agreement," a ministry source said, quoted by state news agency SANA.
The source accused Turkey of "supporting terrorists", using the regime’s usual term for both jihadists and rebels.
It said Ankara was breaching the deal through "occupying Syrian territory via terrorist organisations linked to it or directly via Turkish military forces".
Rebel backer Turkey has twice led incursions into northern Syria in 2016 and 2018, since when its forces and allied Syrian proxies have controlled a patch of territory on the border.
Ankara has repeatedly threatened to march on areas further east, where Kurdish fighters it views as "terrorists" have led the US-backed battle against the Islamic State group.
Washington last month said it would pull all its troops from the war-torn country, leaving the Kurds scrambling to find a new ally in Damascus to avoid a Turkish assault.
On Friday, Erdogan said Turkey expected a "security zone" to be created in Syria in a few months.
Turkey accuses the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) which have led the fight against IS of being an extension of its outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The Adana deal was signed in 1998 to end a crisis between the neighbours, sparked by the then presence in Syria of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and bases run by the group.
