Assad requires the departure of Turkish forces from Syria to hold any meeting with Erdogan

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has announced that he will only meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan if Turkey withdraws its troops from northern Syria, according to an interview published by a Russian media outlet on Thursday.

The comments were made a day after Assad met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, seeking to mend ties between Erdogan and Assad, which have been broken since the war in Syria erupted in 2011.

Assad told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency that "(any meeting) is linked to reaching a stage where Turkey is clearly and without any ambiguity ready for a complete exit from Syrian territory."

The Syrian president added that Turkey should stop supporting opposition fighting groups that control areas of northern Syria, some of which are trained and supported by Turkey.

"This is the only case where there can be a meeting between me and Erdogan," Assad said.

"Other than that, what is the value of the meeting and we did not do it if it would not achieve final results for the war in Syria?" he asked.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad established cordial relations in the first decade of the twenty-first century after years of disagreements between their countries.

But the war in Syria, which has left some 500,<> dead and millions displaced, has strained relations between Damascus and Ankara again.

Diplomats from Iran, Russia, Turkey and Syria are due to meet in Moscow this week in preparation for a meeting of their foreign ministers, but
a Turkish foreign ministry source said on Thursday the meeting had been postponed to an unspecified date.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said last week that the four countries' deputy foreign ministers would meet this week in Moscow ahead of planned talks between foreign ministers later aimed at resolving the crisis in Syria.