'Why not with one on our border?': What Turkey's Erodgan said on mending ties with Syria

Turkish President

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

on Sunday expressed his willingness to mend ties with Syria, extending an "invitation" to restore relations to "how they were in the past."
The

diplomatic ties

between the two countries were severed more than 12 years ago when protests in Syria escalated into a

civil war

, with Turkey backing armed opposition groups in the northwest that sought to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

"Yesterday, we were not enemies with Syria. We met with Assad as a family", Erdogan told journalists Sunday on a flight from Berlin, where he watched Turkey play the Netherlands in the quarter-final of the European Championship's soccer tournament, according to news agency AP.
"We talk about mediation everywhere, so why not with the one on our border?" Erdogan added in comments reported by the state-run Anadolu news agency.

Prior to the conflict, Erdogan and Assad had a close relationship, even vacationing together with their families in southern Turkey in 2008. Both leaders recently signalled their willingness to ease tensions and normalise diplomatic relations.
This development comes as Turkey faces growing pressure to send back millions of

Syrian refugees

amidst a severe economic downturn and increasing

anti-refugee sentiment

.
Last week, anti-Syrian riots erupted in Kayseri, central Turkey, following reports that a Syrian refugee had allegedly sexually harassed a 7-year-old Syrian girl. Residents of Melikgazi overturned cars and set shops ablaze, demanding that Syrians leave the country.
In 2023, the Turkish and Syrian foreign ministers met in Moscow alongside their Russian and Iranian counterparts, marking the highest-level contact between Ankara and Damascus since the beginning of the Syrian war.
However, those talks and a prior meeting involving the defense ministers of the two countries did not yield any significant results.
Indications of a thaw between Erdogan and Assad, including plans to open a crossing between Syrian government-held areas and those controlled by opposition groups in Aleppo province, have led to increased tensions in towns under the control of the Turkish-backed opposition.
The Idlib-based "salvation government" of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a formerly al-Qaida-linked insurgent group that controls other parts of northwestern Syria — issued a statement on July 1 calling on Turkey to "assume its legal and moral responsibilities to protect Syrian refugees."