Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, said Tuesday in an official meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that any military attack on northern Syria ‘will definitely harm Turkey, Syria, and the entire region.’

In response to Erdoğan’s remarks about ‘terrorist groups’, Khamenei stated that ‘terrorism must surely be confronted, but a military attack in Syria will benefit the terrorists.’

He also stressed that ‘terrorists are not limited to a specific group.’

Erdoğan is visiting Tehran to hold talks with the Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The talks will take place within the framework of the Astana peace process which Tehran, Ankara and Moscow initiated in 2017, aiming to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis.

Erdoğan will be holding bilateral meetings with Raisi and Putin as well.

The meetings of presidents are critical particularly since Turkey has been planning to launch a large scale military campaign in northern Syria to further occupy parts of the region, allegedly in order to expand a ‘security corridor’ against ‘terrorists’, namely the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), that has been waging a fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) since 2015 in cooperation with the International Coalition forces.