For several weeks now, a protest movement has been emerging in some areas in northwestern Syria, trying to work against a Syrian-Turkish settlement. It has expressed itself in part by standing against the reopening of the “Abu al-Zandin” crossing, in addition to a number of other activities and events.

Official Syrian, Turkish, and Russian statements over the past week regarding the Syrian-Turkish settlement, made by the Syrian president, the Russian foreign minister, and Turkish officials, indicate that the gradual steps towards reaching a settlement, which have extended for more than two years starting with the Tehran summit of the Astana trio in July 2022, have come close to reaching a point of no return. This is represented by a meeting at the presidents’ level, which naturally will not be the end of the issue. Instead, it will form the basis for consensus that will be followed by the practical implementation of the steps of that consensus.

For years since 2011, the regime and opposition extremists have been in agreement to reject dialogue, they have now been in agreement for several years to call for dialogue. However, the most important question is: what dialogue, how, about what, and for what?

The European policy, said to be “new”, towards Syria is summed up in one clear sentence that came in the non-paper that eight European countries sent mid last month to the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The aforementioned sentence is: “Today, a political solution in line with UN resolution 2254 seems out of reach”.

More than ten months have passed since the start of the open “Israeli”/American genocidal aggression against Gaza and Palestine as a whole. After the Americans have brazenly and openly acted against any talk of a ceasefire throughout the first five months, they kept on insisting on continuing the massacre after that, albeit in more oblique and hypocritical ways, which their international isolation has pushed them to do, particularly in this issue.

Our entire region, and the wider world, are living on the verge of a major escalation and many dangerous possibilities. The direct driver of this situation is the American / “Israeli” behavior primarily towards Palestine, and secondarily towards all the region’s files, especially with the clear transition to adopting systematic terrorism policies represented by successive political assassinations.

The recent non-paper on Syria that a group of European countries launched, as well as the appointment of an Italian ambassador to Syria after a long hiatus, have sparked a series of reactions.

On the outside, things appear to be stagnant in Syria in the political sense. Whether it is talking about the brakes applied against the progress of the Syrian-Turkish settlement, or about the People’s Assembly elections that passed as if they had not happened, or about the West’s formal continuation of its same policies, and other indicators that are relied upon to say that nothing has changed and nothing will change anytime soon.

Tomorrow, Monday, July 15, new elections will be held for the Syrian People’s Assembly. These elections, like many elections that took place in Syria during the crisis and even before it, receive a modest amount of media attention, not to mention the low popular interest towards them.

The People’s Will Party (PWP) took a supportive position for an Astana-sponsored Syrian-Turkish settlement from the outset of talking about this subject in mid-2022. It is not an exaggeration to say that the PWP was among the first to ponder this idea and its importance on the pages of Kassioun even before it was announced. Despite the usual and expected attacks from the enemies of the political solution on all sides, nevertheless, the PWP continued to defend, explain, and interpret its position through a number of articles and studies.