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US envoy heads to Turkey seeking to ensure aid to Syrians

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.S ambassador to the United Nations headed to Turkey late Tuesday seeking to ensure that humanitarian aid can be delivered to Syria across borders, a program Russia has severely limited in recent years while insisting the Syrian government should control all assistance to millions in need.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s visit comes ahead of the July 10 expiration of the U.N. Security Council mandate for humanitarian aid deliveries, now reduced from four initial international crossing points to a single border crossing from Turkey to Syria’s rebel-held northwest at the insistence of Russia, Syria’s closest ally.

The trip also comes ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s first meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels on June 14.

Ties between Ankara and Washington, which once considered each other as strategic partners, steadily deteriorated in recent years over differences on Syria, Turkey’s cooperation with Russia and Turkish naval interventions in the eastern Mediterranean, which U.S. officials have described as destabilizing.

Erdogan toned down his anti-Western and anti-U.S. rhetoric in an apparent effort to reset the rocky relationship with his NATO allies, but the Turkish leader was met with silence from Biden until they spoke April 23 and agreed to this month’s meeting. By comparison, he spoke to President Donald Trump just days after the 2016 election.

The U.S. Mission to the United Nations said in an announcement Tuesday that Thomas-Greenfield would meet with senior Turkish officials during the Wednesday-Friday visit “to discuss opportunities to strengthen the U.S.-Turkey relationship, work with our NATO ally to address global challenges (and) improve cooperation on Syria.”

A senior official at the mission called this “a moment of intense engagement with senior Turkish officials,” pointing to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s visit last week ahead of the Biden-Erdogan meeting. But the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, would not say whether Thomas-Greenfield would meet with the Turkish president.

“Turkey is a critical NATO ally, and we have a strategic relationship that spans an enormous breadth of issues and concerns, including global and regional security issues, obviously, economic issues related to democracy and human rights,” the official said, saying the U.S. expects all these issues to be discussed in Thomas-Greenfield's meetings.

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