ANKARA: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will travel to Iran for a two-day official visit to discuss bilateral and global issues with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi, a statement by the presidency said Sunday.
The president will visit Iran on Monday and will attend a number of meetings, and co-chair the seventh meeting of the Turkish-Iranian High-Level Cooperation Council with Raisi on July 19. The meeting will touch upon an extensive evaluation of Turkey-Iran relations and analyze bilateral steps to be taken to enhance ties further.
Erdoğan will also attend a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin under the scope of the Astana process. The three leaders are expected to discuss recent developments in Syria, and the counterterrorism fight, including against the Daesh and the YPG/PKK. They are also expected to discuss the voluntary return of Syrian refugees to their homes. The president will also attend a bilateral meeting with Putin on the summit’s sidelines.
The Astana talks for peace in Syria were launched in 2017 at the initiative of these three countries. Its meetings also contribute to the advancement of the United Nations-led diplomatic process in Geneva.
Putin will travel to Tehran on July 19 for a Syria summit with Erdoğan and Raisi, the Kremlin announced Tuesday.
Russia, Turkey and Iran have in recent years been holding talks on Syria as part of the called the “Astana peace process” to end more than 11 years of conflict in the Middle Eastern country.
Separately, a member of the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) who Sweden’s Supreme Court blocked from being extradited to Turkey has been found to be one of the terror group’s ringleaders.
Just weeks after Sweden signed an agreement with Turkey allowing Stockholm to join NATO as long as it take steps to address Ankara’s terrorism concerns, Swedish media reports emerged recently that the court blocked the extradition of the FETÖ member, who was identified as Yılmaz Aytan, a so-called covert imam running the terror group’s schools in Afghanistan.
Since 2018, Aytan has had a permanent residence permit in Sweden, where he filed for asylum to escape efforts launched against the terror group. He has since been granted refugee status, according to Swedish media.
Sweden, along with Finland, formally applied to join NATO last month, a decision spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine. FETÖ and its United States-based leader Fetullah Gülen orchestrated a defeated coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016, in which 251 people were killed and 2,734 injured.
FETÖ was also behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary.
Authorities in Turkey uncovered that Aytan is a user of the organization’s encrypted communication app ByLock and is among the top members of the terrorist organization.
The Turkish Justice Ministry has filed a request with Sweden to extradite Aytan for the crime of “forming/leading an armed terrorist organization.”
The Swedish daily Dagens Juridik reported on Friday that the extradition of the 48-year-old man was stopped by the Supreme Court, which denied that Aytan’s actions with the FETÖ terrorist group did not constitute crimes in Sweden. –Agencies
