CAIRO, December 22. /TASS/. Syria’s authorities are ready to build strategic relations with Turkey in a range of areas, Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said.

"We discussed relations between Syria and Turkey in the economic, political, and social spheres," he said after a meeting with visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. "Turkey is a friend to Syria. Since the first days of the revolution, it has been helping us. We will not forget this and plan to build strategic relations with Ankara in the future," the Al Jazeera television channel quoted him as saying.

According to al-Sharaa, partnership with Turkey will help Syria’s new authorities resolve some of the problems they are facing, such as the return of refugees. Thus, according to statistics from the country’s leadership, at least half of Syrians are currently living abroad. Apart from that, the country’s infrastructure has been demolished by the "previous regime," while the existing sanctions are complicating the country’s recovery, he said and called on the world community to lift the sanction that were imposed on the Bashar Assad regime. "It is necessary to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people as much as possible," he stressed.

He also reiterated that armed groups operating in Syria would soon declare their self-dissolution and would be incorporated into defense ministry’s structures. According to al-Sharaa, the majority of commanders accepted this condition even before the armed operations against Assad. He vowed that he will not "tolerate uncontrolled arms trafficking" across the country.

Armed opposition units in Syria launched a large-scale offensive on government troops in the Aleppo and Idlib governorates in late November. On December 8, they entered Damascus, while President Bashar Assad stepped down and fled the country. On December 10, Mohammed al-Bashir, who had led the so-called Syrian Salvation Government in the Idlib governorate, announced his appointment as head of Syria’s interim government, saying that the transitional period will last until March 1, 2025.