Istanbul summit just a beginning to Syria peace

The summit held by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian, French and German counterparts, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel on the Syrian conflict ended on Saturday in Istanbul on familiar grounds.

Erdogan said at a press conference at the end of the summit that the four leaders have agreed that it would be the Syrian people who will determine the future of Syrian President Bashar Assad. There is nothing new, promising or spectacular about this conclusion as the international community at large, including the four leaders who just concluded their summit in Turkey, have been saying this all along.

The knot that has still to be cracked is how, by what means and when this prescription for determining the fate of Assad could be settled. Notably absent from the summit was the US, which remains a big player in the Syrian conflict despite its diminishing military involvement.

The summit ended up concentrating on the status and future of the demilitarised zone in Idlib. As one seasoned commentator said, there are still a million questions which remain unanswered on Syria and the resolution of its conflict. Yet, maintaining the ceasefire in Syria is a good beginning, even though it cannot alone be the final solution. As long as the Syrian people themselves — through their freely elected lawful representatives — are not sitting together around the negotiating table, all outside help is not going to be enough.

Now that the UN Geneva peace talks on Syria have been eclipsed by the Astana peace talks, it is now left to the four powers which took part in the Istanbul summit to fill in the blanks and come to a workable solution. This does not appear to be on the horizon, not just yet, which means that the truce in Syria is fragile and the much sought-after political solution remains in limbo for much longer. This also means that the four-nation summit in Istanbul can only be the beginning and not the end of the political process for ending the Syrian conflict.

The US must be engaged in this process to ensure a wider international base for the ultimate resolution of the eight-year-old Syrian conflict.