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"The whole world is watching this meeting. I hope, that the hopes will be met," Erdogan said, while opening the summit.

The four leaders are also expected to be joined by UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura. The four-way summit is an entirely new format of talks on the war-torn country, which has endured years-long conflict.

The meeting is all about testing the waters and trying to bring about different formats of talks on Syria, as if the leaders were to "synchronize watches" rather than reach a breakthrough, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Similar opinion was expressed by Germany, with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stating that the summit effectively brings different sides together for the very first time.

"There are Russians and Turks, who have been at the same format of talks with Iran. And on the other side, there are French and us, who partake in the so-called 'Friends of Syria' group," Maas said ahead of the event, adding that having a "joint conversation" was a viable idea.

Turkey, which is hosting the summit, appears to be a little bit more optimistic about the high-profile event. According to the spokesman for Turkey's President, Ibrahim Kalin, the leaders are expected to discuss prospects of political settlement in Syria, and might agree on some sort of reconciliation roadmap and the main ideas for the new Syrian Constitution.

Setting up the committee to draft a new Syrian constitution is a priority, but eliminating the remaining "radical elements" in the country remains an important objective, Russia's Vladimir Putin said at the Istanbul summit.

"While the degree of violence in Syria has been greatly reduced, elimination of all the radical elements is still an important task," President Vladimir Putin said, speaking after the four-way Syria summit with leaders of Turkey, France and Germany. "We cannot allow the battle-hardened bandits to carry on with their illicit activities, to create "sleeper cells" in our countries, recruit supporters and spread extremist ideology and terror."

Turkey is sticking to its commitments over the Idlib ceasefire deal, Putin said, but added that Ankara has not yet been able to force all the radicals in the region to comply with the agreement. Russia's leader expressed hopes that the ceasefire will be fully implemented in the future.

If the terrorists continue to launch attacks from Idlib, Moscow reserves the right to provide armed support to the Syrian government to clear the region by force, Putin stated.

While the Idlib agreement is very important, it still is a "temporary measure," he said. Lasting peace can be only brought through a political solution, the Russian president stressed, adding that the committee to draft a new Syrian constitution is expected to begin its work before the end of the year.

"The fate of the country must be ultimately decided by the Syrian people," he added.

Of course, the US has a large responsibility to bear for this awful situation in Colombia, as it has been the intellectual author behind Colombia's brutal, decades-long war against its own people and has provided billions of dollars of material aid to this war effort. Indeed, since 2000, the US has given Colombia $10 billion in mostly military assistance as part of its counter-insurgency program known as 'Plan Colombia.' During the Plan Colombia years, the Colombian military attempted to boost US military assistance by murdering civilians in cold blood and passing them off as left-wing guerillas. It is now believed that the military killed 10,000 civilians in this grisly "false positive" operation.

But the US is also behind an even darker force than the Colombian military - that is, the Colombian paramilitary death squads. While those who live in the more remote parts of Colombia are painfully aware of the paramilitaries' presence and brutality, the paramilitaries are now a well-kept secret in the more well-to-do parts of Colombia's big cities and even more so outside of Colombia. Indeed, the Colombian and US governments deny the very existence of these paramilitary groups, and the compliant press is happy to oblige in keeping this dirty secret.