Turkey’s Chief of Staff Hulusi Akar met with his Iranian and Russian counterparts in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi Nov. 21 to lay the groundwork for a critical summit to be held Nov. 22 between leaders of all three nations, where they will thrash out what many observers label “mission impossible” — a political settlement to Syria’s six-year-long civil conflict. The summit will coincide with a separate gathering in Riyadh of tens of groups opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It is meant to achieve a similarly gargantuan task — to agree on a common position before United Nations peace talks resume in Geneva on Nov. 28.

The dizzying diplomacy took a further unexpected turn when Assad arrived in Sochi Nov. 21 to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photos of the two men embracing sent a strong signal to other stakeholders ahead of the talks that Assad is not going away anytime soon and certainly not under Russian pressure.

Akar and his fellow generals were expected to focus mainly on the four de-escalation zones in Syria, where a pause in fighting and in airstrikes is meant to allow civilians to return and for a modicum of peace to gel paving the way for future talks between the regime and its opponents. The accord reached in May in the Kazakh capital, Astana, has been hanging by a thread with repeated violations notably by government forces.

The province of Idlib on the Turkish border where the al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) continues to hold sway remains the most critical piece of the deal, as it is these militants who pose the biggest threat to the regime, and many European and US officials would argue, eventually to the West.