According to a Lebanese official, President Michel Aoun and the leader of the Syrian government, Bashar al-Assad, talked about defining the shared marine borders between their two nations today, Saturday.
Last year, a disagreement over their shared marine borders erupted after Syria authorised a Russian energy company to begin maritime excavations in a region that Lebanon admits is connected to it. Gas was found in several places in the eastern Mediterranean.
Aoun previously said that the marking of the boundary would follow Lebanon’s agreement on its southern naval border with Israel, the country it has been at odds with inadvertently for years.
Aoun advised Assad that Lebanon was eager to “launch negotiations with Syria to demarcate its northern maritime borders,” the Lebanese official told Reuters after the talks on Saturday. Last year, the two presidents talked about how borders are drawn.
The specifics of the demarcation have not yet been negotiated, according to the Syrian “Sham FM” radio, and Assad has suggested direct discussions through the two foreign ministries of the two nations.
On October 31, Aoun’s term as president of Lebanon, which is undergoing a serious political crisis, comes to an end. Throughout its three sessions, the House of Representatives failed to defeat Aoun.
Al-Assad was elected to a second seven-year term as president last year in elections that the Syrian opposition and the West deemed to be a farce.
After the government reclaimed control of a sizable portion of the territory it had lost to opposition troops during the conflict that erupted in 2011, elections were held.
Following the Beirut Accord with Israel, Lebanon and Syria are debating their maritime borders.
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