Erdogan impatient to charge ahead in Syria as Ankara sizes up Pompeo
The US president's choice for his new secretary of state comes at an inconvenient time for Erdogan’s plans to capitalize on Turkey’s victory over the US-allied Syrian Kurdish militia in Afrin.
It is not clear at this stage what effect President Donald Trump’s nomination of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state will have on Turkish-American ties, already strained over a number of seemingly intractable issues.
What is clear, though, is that Ankara is rattled with Trump’s choice. The reason is a tweet by Pompeo during the coup attempt in July 2016 in which he likened Turkey, alongside Iran, to a “totalitarian Islamic dictatorship.”
The implication of the tweet, which Pompeo later deleted, appeared to be that the attempted coup — which had still not failed at the time of the message — may have been an auspicious event. It only served to reinforce the belief in Ankara that Washington was somehow behind the attempt to get rid of Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP).
The subsequent failure by the United States to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Islamic preacher residing in Pennsylvania who Ankara accuses of masterminding the failed coup, and members of his retinue still fuels this belief.
