President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Friday that there is no reason for his country not to forge renewed ties with neighboring Syria.

"There is no reason not to establish (relations with Syria)," Erdoğan told reporters after Friday prayers in Istanbul.

He emphasized that Ankara has no plans or goals to interfere in Syria's internal affairs.

"Just as we once developed relations between Türkiye and Syria, we will act together in the same way again," he added.

Erdoğan's comments come a few days after President Bashar Assad said Syria was open to all initiatives to revive relations with Türkiye.

Speaking during a meeting with Russian Presidential Special Envoy Alexander Lavrentiev, Assad affirmed that Syria is open to all initiatives regarding Syrian-Turkish relations as long as they are based on respecting the sovereignty of the Syrian state over all its territory and fighting all forms of terrorism, according to regime’s news agency SANA. Türkiye has repeatedly assured the regime that they respect that sovereignty while carrying out operations against the PKK/YPG.

The Damascus-based regime and Ankara sought reconciliation in 2023 with talks sponsored by Assad’s main backers, Russia and Iran, but so far, meetings of Turkish and Syrian regime ministers have failed to produce a solid result in normalization.

Turkish-Syrian relations saw a decline in 1998 when Türkiye accused Syria of supporting the PKK, a terrorist group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in its decades-long terror campaign against Türkiye.

Tensions further escalated in 2011 due to the start of the Syrian Civil War and a subsequent influx of migrants numbering over four million.