"A new age for Turkey-Syria relations
By K Gajendra Singh
Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer's visit to Damascus, despite United States ambassador to Ankara Eric Edelman's public stand against it, highlights the churning of regional strategic relationships in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, and more recently the September 11 attacks on the US and its illegal invasion of Iraq.
Sezer's visit this week is a reciprocation of Syrian President Bashar Assad's visit to Ankara in January 2004, the first ever such visit since Syria broke away from Ottoman Turkey after World War I. As recently as 1998, Turkey had threatened to invade Syria unless it expelled Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Marxist Kurdish Workers party (PKK), sheltered by Damascus as a lever against Turkey for its share of Euphrates waters and irredentist claims over Hatay province, which was annexed to Turkey in 1939. "
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