ANKARA/ISTANBUL: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he believed relations with Washington would improve under President-elect Donald Trump and that the two NATO allies would reach an easier consensus on regional issues.
Ties between the US and Turkey — which has the second largest army in the NATO alliance and is key to the US-led fight against Daesh in Syria and Iraq — have deteriorated sharply since a failed military coup in July.
Erdogan and the government blame the abortive putsch on Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and want him extradited. Gulen denies involvement in the coup.
Ankara has also been angered by US support for a Kurdish militia group fighting Daesh in Syria. Turkey sees the group as an extension of the PKK, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey and has been behind a spate of recent bombings.
“I believe we will accelerate dialogue when Mr. Trump takes office,” Erdogan told a conference of Turkish ambassadors. “I believe we will reach a consensus with Mr. Trump, particularly on regional issues.”
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the envoys he believed Trump would not make what he called the same mistakes as the outgoing US administration. Washington should extradite Gulen and end cooperation with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.
The US has long been cast by some nationalist and radical elements as the guiding hand behind plots to undermine Turkey. Conspiracy theories have reached fever pitch in recent weeks, and in some cases been fueled by elected officials.
The hard-line Yeni Akit newspaper said last week that a New Year’s Day shooting which killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub, claimed by Daesh, was a “joint production” by the CIA, Israel’s Mossad spy agency, and what the Turkish government calls “FETO,” the Gulenist Terror Organization.
“Daesh, the PKK and FETO are terror groups with strings linked to the same center. Along with many secret services, the most active user is the CIA,” Samil Tayyar, a ruling AK Party lawmaker, said on Twitter after the attack.
Such comments prompted a rebuke last Thursday from US State Department spokesman John Kirby: “Incendiary and false accusations about the US in Turkish media are offensive and could endanger our citizens. Must stop,” he wrote on Twitter.
Any honeymoon with the new Trump administration is likely to be short-lived.
US officials have made clear the issue of Gulen’s extradition is a matter for the courts, not a question of political will, and that such a process could take years.
Trump’s policy on the Kurdish YPG is unclear. He has indicated, though, that his priority in the multi-sided Syrian conflict will be fighting Daesh — not forcing President Bashar Assad to leave power as Turkey has long desired.
Erdogan sees better ties with US under Trump
Erdogan sees better ties with US under Trump
Egypt denies court ruling threatens historic monastery
- A court in Sinai ruled on that the monastery ‘is entitled to use’ the land, which ‘the state owns as public property’
- Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens called the court ruling ‘scandalous’
A court in Sinai ruled on Wednesday in a land dispute between the monastery and the South Sinai governorate that the monastery “is entitled to use” the land, which “the state owns as public property.”
President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s office defended the ruling Thursday, saying it “consolidates” the site’s “unique and sacred religious status,” after the head of the Greek Orthodox church in Greece denounced it.
Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens called the court ruling “scandalous” and an infringement by Egyptian judicial authorities of religious freedoms.
He said the decision means “the oldest Orthodox Christian monument in the world, the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine in Mount Sinai, now enters a period of severe trial — one that evokes much darker times in history.”
El-Sisi’s office in a statement said it “reiterates its full commitment to preserving the unique and sacred religious status of Saint Catherine’s monastery and preventing its violation.”
The monastery was established in the sixth century at the biblical site of the burning bush in the southern mountains of the Sinai peninsula, and is the world’s oldest continually inhabited Christian monastery.
The Saint Catherine area, which includes the eponymous town and a nature reserve, is undergoing mass development under a controversial government megaproject aimed at bringing in mass tourism.
Observers say the project has harmed the reserve’s ecosystem and threatened both the monastery and the local community.
Archbishop Ieronymos warned that the monastery’s property would now be “seized and confiscated,” despite “recent pledges to the contrary by the Egyptian President to the Greek Prime Minister.”
Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis contacted his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty on Thursday, saying “there was no room for deviation from the agreements between the two parties,” the ministry’s spokesperson said.
In a statement to Egypt’s state news agency, the foreign ministry in Cairo later said rumors of confiscation were “unfounded,” and that the ruling “does not infringe at all” on the monastery’s sites or its religious and spiritual significance.
Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said “Greece will express its official position ... when the official and complete content of the court decision is known and evaluated.”
He confirmed both countries’ commitment to “maintaining the Greek Orthodox religious character of the monastery.”
Israel aid blockage making Gaza ‘hungriest region on earth’, UN office says
BERLIN: Israel is blocking all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, with almost no ready-to-eat food entering what its spokesperson described as “the hungriest place on earth.”
Spokesperson Jens Laerke said only 600 of 900 aid trucks had been authorized to get to Israel’s border with Gaza, and from there a mixture of bureaucratic and security obstacles made it all but impossible to safely carry aid into the region.
“What we have been able to bring in is flour,” he told a regular news conference on Friday. “That’s not ready to eat, right? It needs to be cooked... 100 percent of the population of Gaza is at risk of famine.”
Tommaso della Longa, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, added that half of its medical facilities in the region were out of action for lack of fuel or medical equipment. (Reporting by Thomas Escritt, editing by Rachel More)
Hamas receives Israeli response to US Gaza proposal and is reviewing it
- Hamas: Israeli response fails to meet any of the Palestinian “just and legitimate demands”
DUBAI: Hamas has received Israel’s response to a US proposal for a Gaza ceasefire deal and is thoroughly reviewing it, even though the response fails to meet any of the Palestinian “just and legitimate demands,” group’s official Basem Naim said on Friday.
Daesh claims first attack on Syrian government forces since Assad’s fall
- Daesh, which once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, is opposed to the new authority in Damascus led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa
- Daesh was defeated in Syria in March 2019 when SDF fighters captured the last sliver of land that the extremists controlled
BEIRUT: The Daesh group has claimed responsibility for two attacks in southern Syria, including one on government forces that an opposition war monitor described as the first on the Syrian army to be adopted by the extremists since the fall of Bashar Assad.
In two separate statements issued late Thursday, Daesh said that in the first attack, a bomb was detonated targeting a “vehicle of the apostate regime,” leaving seven soldiers dead or wounded. It said the attack occurred “last Thursday,” or May 22, in the Al-Safa area in the desert of the southern province of Sweida.
Daesh said that the second attack occurred this week in a nearby area during which a bomb targeted members of the US-backed Free Syrian Army, claiming that it killed one fighter and wounded three.
There was no comment from the government on the claim of the attack and a spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the attack on government forces killed one civilian and wounded three soldiers, describing it as the first such attack to be claimed by Daesh against Syrian forces since the fall of the 54-year Assad family’s rule in December.
Daesh, which once controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, is opposed to the new authority in Damascus led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who was once the head of Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and fought battles against Daesh.
Over the past several months, Daesh has claimed responsibility for attacks against the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast.
Daesh was defeated in Syria in March 2019 when SDF fighters captured the last sliver of land that the extremists controlled. Since then, its sleeper cells have carried out deadly attacks, mainly in eastern and northeast Syria.
In January, state media reported that intelligence officials in Syria’s post-Assad government thwarted a plan by Daesh to set off a bomb at a Shiite Muslim shrine south of Damascus.
Al-Sharaa met with US President Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia earlier this month during which the American leader said that Washington would work on lifting crippling economic sanctions imposed on Damascus since the days of Assad.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the meeting that Trump urged Al-Sharaa to diplomatically recognize Israel, “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria” and help the US stop any resurgence of the Daesh group.
Israel far-right minister says ‘time to go in with full force’ in Gaza
- Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Friday it was time to use “full force” in Gaza, after Hamas said a new US-backed truce proposal failed to meet its demands
JERUSALEM: Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Friday it was time to use “full force” in Gaza, after Hamas said a new US-backed truce proposal failed to meet its demands.
“Mr Prime Minister, after Hamas rejected the deal proposal again — there are no more excuses,” Ben Gvir said on his Telegram channel. “The confusion, the shuffling and the weakness must end. We have already missed too many opportunities. It is time to go in with full force, without blinking, to destroy, and kill Hamas to the last one.”
