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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has traveled to Qatar for a two-day visit to strengthen ties between the two allies, Turkish journalists say.
Erdogan and Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani will chair the 7th Qatar-Turkey Supreme Strategic Committee meeting on Tuesday. Turkish delegates for ministers and business leaders will also meet with their Qatari counterparts.
The Turkish ambassador to Qatar, Mustafa Goksu, told Al Jazeera Arabic that the conference would include signing agreements in various fields including culture, trade, finance, rest, sports, development, health, and religion.
The two countries have already signed a number of agreements since the first Supreme Strategic Committee meeting in 2015. Trade between Doha and Ankara is expected to increase this year than last year, Goksu said.
Thousands of Turkish troops are in Doha, the only Turkish base in the Gulf region. Several Qatari troops and 36 fighter jets are expected to be deployed to Turkey, one of Doha’s advanced training efforts.
Turkey is facing a sharp foreign exchange crisis due to the economic crisis as well the rapid descent of the lira, with Qatar currently offering $ 15bn in exchange for the currency, the limit was raised from $ 5bn following talks between the two countries in May 2020.
The two countries came very close in 2017 after Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt closed Qatar. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt have blamed Qatar for interfering in their affairs and the support groups that joined the 2011 Arab Spring riots in the region.
Diplomatic relations, as well as trade and travel, with Qatar were severed by the blocs, which led to fears of a disruption of regular supplies of food.
Within days, however, Qatar and Turkey agreed on a new deal that saw Qatar bring in a number of important Turkish airlines and airlines. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that Turkey would send several hundred additional troops to its base in Qatar.
The closure was lifted in January this year and Sheikh Tamim attended a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Saudi Arabia afterwards.
Heat for many reasons?
Turkey also appears to be seeking to restore relations with Gulf countries in recent months, according to Bulent Aras, an assistant professor at Gulf Studies Center, Qatar University, and an international professor of international relations at Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University.
“Turkey and Qatar are seeing face to face on almost every issue in the Middle East, and I must say that this cooperation between Turkey and the GCC took place only after the Gulf crisis, especially on paper,” he said. Al Jazeera. “So you can imagine that there was an alliance between Turkey and Qatar in terms of integration and timing.”
Humor comes as Abu Dhabi’s sheikh, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met with Erdogan in Ankara last month when he signed a series of agreements, including billions of dollars’ worth of pledges, the most important source of foreign investment in the Turkish crisis. .
There are other indications that relations between the two countries are heating up. Mehmet Ali Ozturk, a Turkish businessman who has been in the UAE since 2018 on charges of paying “terrorist groups” in Syria, has been released and returned to Turkey. Sedat Peker, a Turkish terrorist mastermind whose pornographic videos released in Dubai also include serious crimes against Turkish officials, says he has been re-arrested by UAE officials and could be repatriated to Turkey, which has been demanding his release for a long time.
Erdogan will visit the UAE in February and said in recent weeks that Turkey is preparing to join Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The Turkish president has spoken of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his origins in what Ankara called the 2013 terrorist attacks.
Turkey has once again developed strong ties with Saudi Arabia, especially after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian delegation at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018. people who are being prosecuted if Riyadh has already convicted them.
Stretched
Aras said Turkey’s transformation was driven by a number of factors, including the notion that Ankara was overrun by war and foreign powers. As the 2023 elections in Turkey approach, Erdogan wants to break away from international conflicts and bring in foreign exchange to try to boost the collapsing economy, he said. “If elections are coming you need to be calm, and your external policies and domestic policies should be managed.”
He added that the response of regional countries seems to be driven by efforts to separate political goals and pragmatic priorities such as economic integration.
Although Qatar and Turkey agree on almost everything, Aras said, there have been recent conflicts.
East of the Mediterranean, Ankara claims that its maritime and northern Cypriot independence with Turkey’s support extends beyond Greece, Egypt, and Libya. Below are the essential oil and gas reserves and the right to drill.
Last week, the government of the Republic of Cyprus agreed to grant a search warrant to Exxon Mobile and Qatar Petroleum, which was opposed by the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
However, according to Aras, Turkish ambassadors hope that, in the future, conflicts will not escalate into economic or military crisis or any other conflict.
“The countries in the region are trying to forge closer ties, so that they can have better economic relations but different, for example, Libya or the Eastern Mediterranean,” Aras said. “This is the result of a learning process, and they realize that there can be no conflict in all classes on all fronts.”
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