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Tomas Avenarius, Istanbul
Politics can sometimes be confusingly supple and agile: Turkey does not set “any preconditions for a dialogue” with neighboring Syria, says Ankara’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu. He has a problem – he needs to sell his President’s recent about-face. After waging his own battle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the past decade, cutting ties and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now claims ties have never been fully severed.