The United Nations General Assembly convening next week in New York will again be dominated by issues from the Middle East. While it is beyond the scope or purpose of this short column to run down all the issues and actors in play, there are two that bear watching: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iraqi President Barham Salih. Both come to New York with a challenging set of interests and objectives facing their countries. Both will be instrumental in what happens in Syria and the Gulf, and with Iran. Here’s a breakdown of what we can expect.

Can Erdogan convince Trump on sanctions, Syria safe zone?

Let’s start with Erdogan. He does National Security by Summit — meaning he tries to get things done when he’s face to face with other leaders. Last week he hosted his Astana trio partners — Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — to discuss Syria. Our take is that Putin inched Erdogan toward his endgame of “Syrian sovereignty” — that is, an eventual rapprochement between the Turkish president and his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, with Putin as the man in the middle, to address the various flashpoints in Syria, including Idlib, the "safe zone" in the northeast and the resettlement of as many as 3 million refugees from Turkey to Syria.

During the summit, Rouhani referred to a 1998 bilateral agreement between Turkey and Syria as a good template for security and conflict reconciliation, as Hamidreza Azizi reports. The Adana agreement, named for the southern Turkish city, kept Turkey and Syria from going to war over the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The Syrian government handed over PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and closed PKK bases in Syria to keep the peace.