ANKARA: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Turkiye on Friday to discuss the developments in Syria after the toppling of strongman Bashar al-Assad, a Turkish official source said Wednesday.

“He will be in Turkiye on Friday,” the source said of the visit which will come just five days after Assad’s unexpected ouster, pledging to share more details “as they are finalised”.

For more than a decade, Washington has sought to keep out of Syria’s political debacle, seeing no viable partner but the lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels is forcing a rethink.

Blinken lays out US hopes for Syria’s political transition

There are around 900 US troops based in Syria since 2014 who have been working with Kurdish-led fighters that have battled IS jihadists in northeastern Syria.

But Washington’s support of the Kurdish forces has put it at odds with Ankara which sees them as an extension of the banned PKK which has led a decades-long bloody insurgency against the Turkish state.