Turkey's Erdogan meets Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the eve of Eid - New Style Motorsport

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday to meet with Saudi leaders for bilateral talks, marking his first visit to the kingdom’s rulers since 2017, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported on Friday. SPA).

Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz He received Erdoğan at the Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah on the night of April 28. After an official reception ceremony and a banquet. cozy Turkish President to Jeddah, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman held an meeting with Erdoğan.

“During the meeting, they reviewed the relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey and the opportunities to develop them in various fields. They also discussed the latest regional and international developments and efforts made towards them,” SPA reported on April 29.

Erdoğan chaired a press conference at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on April 28 moments before flying to Jeddah later that day for what the pro-Erdoğan Turkish newspaper daily saturday described as a “two-day working visit” to Saudi Arabia from April 28-30.

“My visit (to Saudi Arabia) is the manifestation of our common will to start a new era of cooperation as two brother countries,” Erdogan told reporters at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport.

“It is in our common interest to increase our cooperation with Saudi Arabia in fields such as health, energy, food security, agricultural technologies, defense industry and finance,” he said.

“We express on every occasion that we attach as much importance to the stability and security of our brothers in the Gulf region as to our own,” the Turkish leader said.

“Saudi Arabia occupies a special place for Turkey in terms of trade and investment, as well as large-scale projects implemented by our contractors,” Erdogan stated. “The total value of the projects that our contractors have undertaken in Saudi Arabia reaches $24 billion. The complementary nature of our economies is the main factor attracting Saudi investors to Turkey’s dynamic environment.”

“The ties between Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been strained after the murder of [Saudi] journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in 2018,” Al Arabiya noted on April 28.

owned by amazon Washington Post employed Khashoggi as a columnist from 2017 until his death in the fall of 2018. The Meccan-born journalist was assassinated inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018.

Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salman told the Atlantic in an interview published on March 3, he believed that his human right to remain “innocent until proven guilty” was violated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when the organization accused him of ordering the murder of Khashoggi in 2018. The CIA made the accusation in a declassified intelligence report published in February 2021.

Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are majority Sunni Muslim nations. Erdogan’s visit to Saudi Arabia on April 28-30 coincides with the hours leading up to Eid-al-Fitr. The three-day holiday means “fast-breaking festival” in Arabic and marks the end of Ramadan, which is an Islamic holy month marked by fasting from dawn to dusk.

Muslim worshipers perform the Eid al-Fitr morning prayer at the Grand Mosque in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, on May 13, 2021. (ABDULGHANI ESSA/ AFP via Getty Images)

Turkey is officially a secular country, although 99 percent of its estimated population of 82 million is Muslim. Approximately 77.5 percent of Turkey’s Muslim population follows Hanafi Sunni Islam. The total population of Saudi Arabia is estimated at 34.2 million. “Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 21 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims,” the US State Department reported in 2020, noting that approximately 38.3 percent of Saudi residents are foreigners .

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