Turkey's prime minister on Sunday praised booming ties with one-time foe Syria, saying that a joint dam project at the border between the two neighbours would further strengthen co-operation.
"We want the whole region to prosper, together with Turkey... that we struggle not to walk all over each other but to help each other. And we have achieved this with Syria," Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in televised remarks at the Turkish-Syrian border.
He spoke at a ground-breaking ceremony on the banks of the river Orontes - the Asi to Syrians - for a joint "Friendship Dam" that was also attended by his Syrian counterpart Mohammed Naji Otri.
The completed dam will straddle the frontier between the Turkish village of Ziarat and the Syrian village of al-Allani. Erdogan was to travel to the Syrian city of Aleppo for talks with President Bashir al-Assad later Sunday.
"God willing, the dam will be completed in a short time. God willing, we will jointly use the electricity to be produced and we will jointly irrigate our fields," Erdogan said.
The dam - 850 metres (2,800 feet) long and 14.5 metres (48 feet) high - will generate 16 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year and enable the irrigation of 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of land in both countries. The Orontes springs from Lebanon, then flows across north-west Syria into Turkey before reaching the Mediterranean Sea. Turkey and Syria also plan to set up a joint bank, inaugurate a high-speed train between Aleppo and the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep and link their natural gas networks as part of other projects by the end of 2011, he added. After decades of animosity, Turkish-Syrian ties have flourished since 1998, when Damascus forced Turkish Kurd rebel Abdullah Ocalan out of Syria, where he had enjoyed safe haven.
Syria, along with Iraq, have often complained that Turkey - with a series of dams built on the Euphrates and Tigris - monopolises the waters of the two rivers.
Under Erdogan's Islamist-rooted government, ties with Arab countries have seen a spectacular revival, with Ankara signing a series of trade deals and visa-free travel accords with countries in the region. Ankara's drive for a leadership role in the Middle East has led some to suggest that Erdogan's government is pursuing a "neo-Ottoman" policy in a region its forebears ruled for centuries.
Pointing to a shared history, Erdogan said Sunday that "Turks, Arabs and other ethnic groups in the region fought together and died together" against the Crusaders, Christian knights from western Europe who fought for control of parts of Turkey and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. "And not only against the Crusades, throughout the 1,000 years that followed we were together on this soil, we were brothers to each other. "We have always said that there should be no problems between brothers... and that if there are any, they should be resolved," he said.
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