Turkish Airlines will resume flights to Damascus, officials say after visit by Syria's new rulers

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish Airlines will resume its flights to Damascus, Syria, next week after a halt of more than a decade, officials said Wednesday following a visit by a delegation of Syria’s new, Turkey-backed rulers.

The CEO of Turkey’s national carrier, Bilal Eksi, said there would be three flights a week, starting on Jan. 23. “We are returning to Damascus,” Eksi said in a post on the social media platform X.

His announcement followed a visit earlier in the day by Syria’s new foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, who held talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other top officials In the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Al-Shibani is part of Syria’s new, de facto authorities under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, an Islamist group behind the lightning insurgency that ousted President Bashar Assad in December and ended his family’s decades-long rule. From 2011 until Assad’s downfall, Syria’s uprising and civil war killed an estimated 500,000 people.

The new rulers in Syria are eager to establish diplomatic ties with regional and global governments.

Speaking alongside al-Shibani at a news conference, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan alluded to plans to reopen Turkey’s Consulate in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Turkey already announced last month it would reopen its embassy in Damascus after a 12-year closure.

Fidan urged for the lifting international sanctions on Syria to support basic public services and facilitate reconstruction of the war-shattered country.

“If sanctions are lifted, the country’s normalization process will accelerate, and conditions will be created that will enable millions of Syrians to return to their country,” Fidan said.

“We came to establish a new country, to rebuild it," al-Shibani said. "We will work with all our might to ensure that it will be a country that has the rights of all its people and is integrated with the region and the world.”

He also pledged that Syria's new rulers would safeguard the “territorial unity of Syria” and prevent any threat to Turkey from Kurdish groups in Syria, including the YPG or the People’s Protection Units, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have U.S. backing.

Ankara claims the Syrian Kurdish groups are allied against Turkey with Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey since 1984. The conflict has spread beyond Turkey’s borders into Iraq and Syria, and has killed tens of thousands of people.

The PKK is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.