This Friday, Oct. 5 inherently appeared as a new deadline in front of Ankara to decide whether United States Pastor Andrew Craig Brunson, whose almost two-year detention in Turkey has continued in the form of house arrest since July 25, would eventually be freed. Everyone who deals with the Turkey file in Washington has been impatiently waiting for the Oct. 12 hearing in İzmir.
In September every year, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting in New York is a golden opportunity for all countries to seek solutions for their most crucial diplomatic matters. All week long, events at the U.N. provide an opportunity for leaders to break formal meeting guidelines and engage in unfiltered and casual conversations. That is why many people wondered Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and United States President Donald Trump were going to engage in a pull aside conversation to overcome the unpalatable state of affairs, which was triggered over the disagreement on the release of American Pastor Andrew Brunson who was detained almost two years ago in İzmir for being a member of FETÖ.
Since I moved to Washington D.C. from Istanbul almost one and a half years ago, I have been in dozens of rooms in the U.S. capital where Turkey was specifically discussed or Turkey somewhat came up in discussions concerning the populist and authoritarian regimes of the 21st century.
While Turkish-American relations have been largely put on hold at the political level following U.S. sanctions that were imposed last month by President Donald Trump to punish Ankara for the continued detention of pastor Andrew Brunson, both sides did a relatively good job in keeping “military to military relations” remote from the stalemate. Although it became evident that the implementation of the Manbij road map was lagging behind Turkey’s expectations, Ankara – at least publicly – did not make a big fuss until recently.
Life in Ankara has never been a piece of cake for U.S. ambassadors in the last 16 years, however, some of them had particularly worse days while not officially but emotionally getting declared a “persona non grata.” One of those to still be recalled as a hate figure in Turkish government circles is retired Ambassador Eric Edelman.
It was June 4 when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reached an agreement for the withdrawal of the YPG, which is considered the Syrian branch of the PKK by Ankara, from the Syrian town of Manbij toward the East of the Euphrates.
It is difficult to say that the process leading up to Turkey’s snap elections on June 24 have received tremendous attention in the U.S. capital. The lack of greater enthusiasm in Washington for the Turkish election process has to do with the perception of most policymakers that the election will not drastically change the political status quo in Ankara.
Turkey and the United States seem to have finally agreed on how to solve the Manbij puzzle in Syria, which has been poisoning relations like an open wound for almost two years. A long-awaited summit between Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week in Washington sealed a road map, which represents the U.S.’s official commitment to the withdrawal of Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) to the east of the Euphrates River.
It was not reported widely by Turkish media for obvious reasons, but the annual 2017 report on international religious freedoms was released by the U.S. State Department a few days ago. Since the first release of the report in 1998, U.S. diplomats all over the world study the state of religious freedoms in 200 countries and highlight the areas of concern and abuse.
