John Kerry refers to Syrian and Iranian issues during the meeting with Davutoglu

On November 18 US Secretary of State John Kerry had a press briefing jointly with Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Davutoglu. After presenting issues connected with the US-Turkish cooperation, John Kerry referred to international important issues. Especially, Syrian crisis was on agenda.

"In Syria, our objective together and with our friends and allies is to stop the bloodshed once and for all. And to do that, we agree that we must get the parties to the negotiating table. We are moving closer to that, literally, day by day now, and we commend the opposition’s recent vote to participate in a Geneva II conference, where we hope to forge the political solution to this conflict. I’ve had conversations when I was recently in Geneva with Foreign Minister Lavrov. I’ve had telephone conversations with fellow foreign ministers over the course of the last week, and now a face-to-face meeting with Foreign Minister Davutoglu, and we are all committed to this goal and will remain so", Kerry said about Syrian issue.

Then, referring to Iranian nuclear problem, Kerry especially noted:

"We also discussed Iran and the key role that Turkey has played in helping to enforce the sanctions that have brought Iran to the negotiating table. This was the very purpose of these sanctions, and we are achieving the goal of at least getting to the negotiation. Now we obviously need to achieve something at that table. We need to remain united in our goal of ensuring that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.

Now, I’ve heard a lot of back and forth in the last days and we respect the vigorous debate; we really do. But the bottom line is that we all agree, all of us, that there must be a verifiable, certain, failsafe process by which the guarantee of not getting a nuclear weapon is clear to all. That means our friends in Israel, that means our friends in the region, and that, of course, means all of us here in the United States and the United States Congress.

As we discussed today, the first step that the P5+1 is working on would stop the Iranian program from advancing while you engage in the negotiation to get to that situation where you have a comprehensive agreement and the guarantees that I talked about"/

Then US high official referred to Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents' meeting which is scheduled for today and announced that he had talked already with both Presidents by phone.