Last week, returning from the G20 summit in Indonesia, Erdogan said he was ready to “start a new beginning” with Cairo
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s unprecedented handshake with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi marked the “beginning of the development of relations” after a decade of estrangement, the Egyptian presidency announced today.
Erdogan, a staunch ally of Egypt’s late president Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, has previously vowed he would “never speak” to “someone like” Sisi, who toppled Morsi in a 2013 coup.
However, Ankara and Cairo appear to have embarked on a rewarming policy recently.
Last week, returning from the G20 summit in Indonesia, Erdogan said he was ready to “start a new beginning” with Cairo.
Yesterday on Sunday the Turkish presidency released a photo of Erdogan and Sisi smilingly exchanging handshakes at the start of the World Cup in Qatar — a country that was another great ally of Morsi — with which Egypt recently reconciled.
The two men “confirmed the depth of the historical ties between the two countries and the two peoples” and decided to “begin the development of bilateral relations,” Egyptian presidential spokesman Bassam Radi said today.
Recently, an Egyptian journalist close to the Muslim Brotherhood was briefly detained in Turkey, raising fears of possible extradition among many Islamists who have taken refuge there.
Ankara is a big supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members Cairo considers “terrorists”, and the two countries support rival camps in Libya: Turkey has sent military advisers and drones against Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the strongman in the east Libya supported mainly by Egypt.
At the commercial level, the two countries have strengthened their trade: it has increased from $4.4 billion in 2007 to $11.1 billion in 2020, notes the Carnegie research center.
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