Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, is expected to discuss the future of Syria-Turkey relations on Tuesday during a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
The meeting in the Turkish capital, Ankara, will be Mr. Erdogan’s first with Mr. al-Shara, the rebel leader who led the opposition offensive that toppled Syria’s former autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad, last month.
Both countries have a lot riding on the future of their relationship.
Turkey shares a long border with Syria, hosts more than three million Syrian refugees who fled during the country’s 13-year civil war and had chilly relations with Mr. al-Assad for years before Mr. Erdogan began speaking of mending ties not long before his ouster. Turkey worries that instability in Syria could cause more refugees to flee or prevent those already in Turkey from returning home.
Turkey also has military posts in northwestern Syria, directly backs Syrian armed groups near the border and considers a Kurdish-led militia in the northeast a grave national security threat.
For Mr. al-Shara, who was appointed interim president last week by a group of rebel leaders, Turkey could provide critical support as he faces the monumental tasks of unifying Syria, reviving its battered economy and transforming a constellation of militias into a national army.
Turkey has been interacting with armed groups that Mr. al-Shara has led since early in the war because they controlled significant territory along Turkey’s southern border, and Turkish officials were among the first to visit him in Damascus after Mr. al-Assad’s fall.
But Turkey, struggling to fix its own economy after years of populist spending and persistently high inflation, would struggle to provide Syria with the financing it needs to restart the economy and begin rebuilding communities that were reduced to rubble during the war.
So Mr. al-Shara has also worked to build ties with the United States, European countries and Gulf Arab leaders. Last week, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, became the first head of state to visit Mr. al-Shara in Damascus. And on Monday, Mr. al-Shara met in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler. To what extent these leaders will help fund the new Syria remains to be seen.
Mr. al-Shara, a former member of Al Qaeda, announced a public break with the group years ago and now expresses more moderate Islamist views. He faces the additional hurdles of heavy sanctions imposed on Syria to punish the Assad regime and the fact that he and the militia he leads remain classified as terrorist by the United States and other countries.
Turkey, too, still classifies Mr. al-Shara’s militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as a terrorist organization.
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