Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu announced on Wednesday that a tripartite meeting in Moscow regarding the ongoing attacks on civilians in Syria's Aleppo was planned with the participation of Turkey, Russia and Iran.
"We will try to reach a nationwide truce in Syria and launch negotiations for a political settlement. In this sense, we will organize a tripartite meeting between Turkey, Russia and Iran in Moscow on December 27", Çavuşoğlu stated.
The Foreign Minister also said that the operation in al-Bab was still continuing. He added that if the operation was successful, they would turn to Manbij.
An evacuation of besieged opposition districts was announced late on Tuesday but did not go ahead as planned early on Wednesday after Iran, one of Bashar Assad's main backers, imposed new conditions, saying it wanted opposition fighters to allow the simultaneous evacuation of two villages.
A ceasefire that had coincided with news of the evacuation plan broke down and fighting raged again in Aleppo on Wednesday.
Over the course of the last 27 days, some 990 civilians have been killed in eastern Aleppo in attacks by the Syrian regime and allied militias, local sources report.
The recent escalation comes amid attempts by the Russia-backed Assad regime to reestablish control over parts of Aleppo captured four years ago by armed opposition groups.
Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which had erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions more displaced by the conflict.
