This week’s budget hearings at the U.S. Congress, where Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified in front of the Foreign Affairs Committees of both the House and the Senate, were quite revealing in terms of the challenging agenda for the upcoming June 4 meeting between Pompeo and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.
The famous “Iran sanctions evasion case” in New York, which started off as the “Zarrab case” then turned into the “Atilla case,” finally ended with the sentencing of Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the deputy director general of Halkbank. Atilla was sentenced to 32 months in prison. This means he will spend roughly a year and a half in prison after deducting his jail time since his arrest in 2017. Yet we still have no clue on how little Iranian-Turkish businessman Reza Zarrab would suffer after having cooperated with the U.S. government.
John Bass, the last ambassador of the United States in Turkey, bid farewell to the country last October in the midst of a visa crisis just after Washington decided to temporarily suspend visa services in Turkey as a reaction to the detention of U.S. Consulate employee Metin Topuz
“Apply the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, or other relevant targeted tools, to deny U.S. visas to and block the U.S. assets of specific officials and agencies identified as responsible for violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief.”
U.S. President Donald Trump woke up on April 11 and once again bombarded Twitter with messages targeting his long-time buddy Vladimir Putin over his support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who the U.S. sees as responsible for last week’s chemical attack in Douma that killed at least 80 people.
Undoubtedly for Ankara, the two most vital questions in Turkish-American relations are the U.S.’s partnership with the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the status of Pennsylvania-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, the prime suspect of the July 2016 coup attempt according to Ankara. For Washington, the priority shifted dramatically following the arrests of foreign service nationals (FSN) in the two U.S. consulates in Turkey on accusations of links to either the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) or what Ankara refers to as the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ).
The work of a “consultation mechanism” to save Turkey-U.S. relations from a constant crisis mode, which was agreed during former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Ankara in February, has hit a snag amid conflicting public statements from the capitals. While two top Turkish officials insisted that the two countries had reached a common understanding for the withdrawal of Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from Manbij towards the east of the Euphrates, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert stated that no agreement had yet been reached with the Turks.
President Donald Trump’s long anticipated dismissal of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is undoubtedly a hiccup for Ankara. This is not necessarily because Tillerson’s named successor Mike Pompeo is likely to stymie progress made during last week’s bilateral talks to reach an agreement over the presence of the U.S.-backed People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria’s Manbij – a longstanding source of tension between the two NATO allies.
Next week Washington will host the first round of meetings of the three committees established to work on areas of dispute between Turkey and the United States. The forming of the committees was agreed on by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Turkish Foreign Minister Çavuşoğlu in their meeting in Ankara on March 16.
