Russia, Turkey keep lines open on Syria amid competing goals

Lavrov is traveling to Turkey on November 30 and will hold a bilateral meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, on December 1. Humanitarian aid should be provided. Cavusoglu said Turkey wanted to “deepen” cooperation with Russian Federation while Lavrov said the two nations agreed that the “normalization (of ties) must be achieved fast”.

“Right now the question is whether Russian Federation will allow Turkey to seize al-Bab”, said the Muntasir Billah Brigade official.

Meanwhile, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the State Duma of Russia, Alexei Pushkov, said the aim of Ankara’s offensive in Syria was not feasible.

A year after the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011, opposition forces took control of the city’s eastern districts. Cavusoglu said Thursday that both sides agreed to lift remaining sanctions, but Lavrov warned the process will take time, offering no timetable for their end. “If those groups had stayed, perhaps Aleppo could have resisted more”, said the official from the Muntasir Billah Brigade, although he doubted it would have changed the course of the battle. The Turkish military campaign in Syria has also led to increasingly strained relations with Assad’s government.

“I don’t find it right to say it here but we are of course continuing our talks with those alternatives”.

It said it occurred near the site of a government air strike that killed at least 20 the day before.

Turkey and the European Union signed a refugee deal in March, which aimed to discourage irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of almost three million Syrian refugees in Turkey. Responding to a question on this issue, Lavrov said that neither Moscow nor Damascus were behind the airstrike.

Both Turkey and Russian Federation, two of the main backers of opposing sides in Syria’s civil war, said they agreed on the need for a halt to fighting and the provision of aid in Aleppo but deep divisions remain between the two countries over the conflict.

He went on to say that “in his estimation” nearly 1 million people have died in the conflict in Syria, although no monitoring group has provided any similar figures.

A separate source in Washington DC confirmed to the Telegraph that Russian Federation had invited influential Islamist group Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, a member of Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, to attend.