MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. The Turkish army will leave Syrian territory once a settlement to the conflict is reached there, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Friday during his visit to Norway.

"If a political settlement in Syria is found, our army will pull out. However, now the [President Bashar al-Assad’s] regime does not believe in a political deal," the NTV channel quoted the minister as saying.

In early July, the Erdogan administration laid out its plans to conduct a military operation in northern Syria. Ankara views the Kurdish armed groups located there as a threat to national security.

Cavusoglu also said that Russia had assured Turkey that the Syrian army would not attack Turkish observation posts in the Idlib Governorate.

"Russia has guaranteed us that the Syrian regime’s forces would not attack our observation posts in Idlib," the newspaper Milliyet quoted him as saying.

On August 19, a Turkish army convoy came under attack in this region while heading to reinforce an observation post. The convoy was travelling along the Aleppo-Damascus highway and, the Syrian Foreign Ministry believes, could have been carrying arms to the opposition in the town of Khan Shaykhun, where the Syrian army had been on the offensive at the time. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the Syrian air force carried out the strike.

In 2017, the northern de-escalation zone was created in the Idlib Governorate and the bordering areas of Aleppo, Latakia and Hama. There are now 12 Turkish observation posts on its soil.