Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar Assad in recent weeks have signaled they are interested in restoring diplomatic ties that have been ruptured for more than a decade. Erdogan says he will soon invite Assad to meet for the first time since Ankara and Damascus broke off relations in 2011. That was the year that mass anti-government protests and a brutal crackdown by security forces in Syria spiraled into a still-ongoing civil war. This is not the first time that there have been attempts to normalize relations between the two countries, but previous attempts failed to gain traction.
