Turkey will not allow extremists to drag Syria back into chaos and instability, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday after a suicide attack killed 22 at a Damascus church.
“We will never allow our neighbor and brother Syria … be dragged into a new environment of instability through proxy terrorist organizations,” he said, vowing to support the new government’s fight against such groups.
He did not explain what he meant by “proxy” groups but promised that Turkey would “continue to support the Syrian government’s fight against terrorism.”
In a separate statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry also denounced Sunday’s “heinous” suicide bombing, saying Ankara was convinced Syrians would remain united in “their fight against terrorist organizations that seek to sow chaos in the country.”
The Damascus government blamed Sunday night’s shooting and suicide attack — the first of its kind in the Syrian capital since the fall of strongman Bashar al-Assad six months ago — on Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group militants.
It cast the attack as a bid to “undermine national coexistence and to destabilize the country,” which only began emerging from the post-civil war chaos after Assad’s ouster six months ago.
Turkey was a key backer of the HTS rebels who ousted Assad under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president, and has repeatedly offered its operational and military to fight ISIL and other militant threats.
© Agence France-Presse