6 yıl önce

Turkey-UAE relations strained in Twitter row

Ahmet Berat Conkar, a senior lawmaker in Turkey's governing AK Party, terms accusations against Ankara made on Twitter by the UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs as "baseless and unfortunate."

AP

In the file photo, Anwar Gargash, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs talks to The Associated Press about relations with Qatar.

Anwar Gargash, the UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, took to Twitter on Saturday to accuse Turkey of not respecting Arab sovereignty and to say that Turkish-Arab relations were not at their best.

Ahmet Berat Conkar, a senior lawmaker in Turkey's governing AK Party, termed the comments as "baseless and unfortunate."

Earlier in December 2017, Gargash was embroiled in a similar spat with Turkey after he said that the Arab world would not be led by Turkey and there was a need for Arab countries to rally around the "Arab axis" of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The statement followed a dispute, which started when UAE Foreign Minister, Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, retweeted a tweet accusing Fahreddin Pasha – an Ottoman governor of Medina from 1916 to 1919 – of committing crimes against the local population and stealing their property.

And as TRT World's Assed Baig reports, the twitter row has added strain to an already tense relationship between the two countries.