Following a weeks-long hiatus moves to restore ties between Ankara and Damascus—after 12 years of bitter hostility—appear to be back on track.

Encouraged by Moscow, the Turkey-Syria reconciliation process was temporarily suspended last month after both countries were rocked by devastating earthquakes.

On March 27, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said the next round of Moscow-hosted talks between Turkish and Syrian officials would likely be held in April.

“We’re getting ready [to host the meeting],” Bogdanov told Russia’s TASS news agency.

He added that Russian mediation efforts were aimed at normalizing Syrian-Turkish relations, which he described as an “important strategic goal.”

NATO member Turkey severed ties with Damascus in 2011. Since then, it has supported armed groups in Syria devoted to President Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow.

Moscow, by contrast, is a staunch supporter of Assad and his government. Since 2015, Russia has maintained forces in Syria at Assad’s invitation.

Despite longstanding differences over Syria, Turkey maintains good relations with Russia, with which it shares extensive trade ties and a lengthy maritime border.

Last December, Moscow hosted a landmark meeting between the defense ministers of Turkey and Syria. It was the first meeting between high-ranking Turkish and Syrian officials in more than a decade.

This was meant to be trailed by a foreign ministers’ meeting, to be followed in turn by a summit between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the momentum towards full-blown rapprochement was blunted on Feb. 6, when both Turkey and Syria were rocked by back-to-back earthquakes.

The quakes left 50,000 people dead in Turkey and thousands more dead in northern Syria and resulted in widespread material damage.

But now that the dust has settled, preparations for a fresh round of Moscow-hosted Turkey-Syria talks appear to be underway.

On March 15, Assad visited Moscow where he met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

During the visit, Assad restated his willingness to hold talks with Turkey as long as they “served the interests of the Syrian people” and led to “concrete results.”

On March 25 Erdogan held a phone call with Putin during which the two leaders stressed the need to follow through with the normalization process, according to a statement released by Erdogan’s office.

Notably, upcoming talks will likely include Iranian representatives as well. Like Moscow, Tehran staunchly supports Damascus and maintains forces in Syria.

During a visit to Ankara earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian voiced his country’s desire to see “a thaw in relations” between Syria and Turkey.

At a joint press conference with Amirabdollahian, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tehran was prepared to help iron out “differences of opinion” between Ankara and Damascus.

Washington, meanwhile, remains firmly opposed to reconciliation—by anyone—with Assad, describing the latter as a “brutal dictator.”

The United States also has a military presence in Syria, especially in the country’s northeast, where it arms and supports the Kurdish YPG militant group.

An offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the YPG is viewed as a terrorist group by both Damascus and Ankara.

Washington says it must keep a military presence in Syria to prevent the resurgence of the ISIS terrorist group, which was largely destroyed—organizationally at least—in 2019.

Recent days have seen mounting tension between Iran and U.S. forces in Syria, the latter of which are said to number roughly 900 troops.

On March 23, a U.S. base in northeastern Syria was attacked by an aerial drone, which U.S. defense officials claimed was “of Iranian origin.”

According to the Pentagon, the drone attack killed a military contractor and injured several servicemen.

The United States responded by striking targets in eastern Syria associated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Defense Department said in a statement.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights later said the U.S. strikes had killed 19 people, including Syrian troops, militiamen, and foreign—presumably Iranian—fighters.

On March 25, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani condemned the U.S. strikes as “terrorist attacks,” claiming that civilians had also been killed.

Denying Iran’s involvement in the purported drone strike, he accused Washington of using the threat posed by ISIS as a pretext for keeping U.S. troops in Syria.

“The U.S. claim that it is present in Syria to fight ISIS, in whose creation it played a substantive role, is a pretext for continuing its occupation and plundering Syria’s natural resources,” Kanaani was quoted as saying by Iran’s Fars news agency.

Following the strikes, U.S. President Joe Biden vowed the United States would “act forcefully” to protect its military forces in Syria.