By Xinhua
Damascus : Visiting Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said here on Thursday that Syria will launch a plan to mediate between Iraq and Turkey to ease tension along their borders and the plan will be announced once it is completed.
“There is a meditation project that will be announced when its conditions are completed,” Mashhadani said in a statement to reporters.
Terming his talks with President Bashar al-Assad and his deputy Farouk al-Shara as “positive and fruitful”, Mashhadani said his talks here focused on two main issues, the dispute with Turkey and the Iraqi refugees.
“We reached common views on both,” he said, adding that his country was keen on Turkey’s security and would cooperate with Ankara against the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) which he termed as an “illegal organization.”
Tension along the Iraqi and Turkish borders remained high after the Turkish parliament approved last week a motion backing the cross-border military operations targeting the PKK based in northern Iraq.
The PKK has increased its attacks on government troops in southeastern Turkey, which has led to rising Turkish demands for an incursion into northern Iraq to crush the rebels based there.
The group, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, launched an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking decades of strife that has claimed more than 30,000 lives.
On the visa conditions Syria imposed on the Iraqi refugees, Mashhadani denied that there is any misunderstanding between Syria and Iraq on the issue, saying the real problem is the refugees’ indefinite staying in Syria.
“The U.S., which is the cause of the problem, by its huge capabilities, couldn’t accommodate more than 7,000 refugees,” Mashhadani noted, affirming that Syria’s hosting for this big number of displaced Iraqis needs a stand by the Iraqi government.
Syria has been hosting more than 1.5 million Iraqi refugees since the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003, which has inflicted a huge burden on the Arab country.