Turkey works on sanctions against Syria

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to announce in early October a series of sanctions against Syria due to its ongoing operations on anti-government protesters.

During his visit to border refugee camps, which shelter more than 7,000 Syrians who fled the unrest in their country, in southeastern Hatay province of Turkey, Erdogan is expected to announce sanctions that mainly target bilateral economic, military and political cooperation, a Turkish official told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

"I terminated my contacts with the Syrian administration. We never wished to reach this point but unfortunately the Syrian administration has led us here," Erdogan said last week.

Speaking in New York during the UN General Assembly meetings last week, Erdogan said Turkey was in coordination with the U.S. in preparing further sanctions on Syria, while Syria's conditions and its demographic features would be taken into account as the sanctions were being drafted, he said. The prime minister also announced that arms shipment to Syria through Turkey was already banned.

Turkey decided to keep selling electricity to Damascus "due to humanitarian reasons," Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said last week, stressing that they did not want to leave the Syrian people in difficult situation.

In response to Turkey's attempt to impose sanctions, Syria has announced to review a free trade agreement (FTA) with Turkey.

"Political relations and economic relations are two different things. We need to review certain articles in the FTA signed with Turkey because it currently favors Turkish trade over Syrian benefits," Turkey's private Cihan news agency quoted Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar, Syrian economy and trade minister, as saying on Monday.

Turkey and Syria enjoyed close relations for the last decade under Ankara's "zero problems with neighbors" policy. Syria became one of Turkey's biggest trading partners. Bilateral trade volume reached 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2010.

Moreover, Ankara initiated to broker a peace deal between Syria and Israel, the two countries technically at war.

Since Syria's anti-government protests broke out in March, Turkey has tried to urge President Bashar al-Assad to conduct reforms and to stop the crackdown on protesters amid the mounting international pressures against the Syrian government.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who paid several visits to Damascus this year after the nationwide protests that dragged the country into unrest, had a six-hour discussion with Assad in Damascus in August in a last attempt to solve problems. He said Ankara was running out of patience with Syria's self- claimed "actions against terrorist groups," which killed more than 2,000 people according to the count of Syrian opposition groups.

After the visit, Syria's official news agency SANA quoted Assad as telling Davutoglu that Damascus "will not be relent in pursuing the terrorist groups in order to protect the stability of the country and the security of the citizens."