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After our April retaliation for Assad’s chemical-weapons attack on Douma, Syria reemerged indirectly, through Turkey’s incarceration of Pastor Andrew Brunson. An apolitical evangelical preacher, he and his family had lived and worked in Turkey for two decades before his arrest in 2016 after a failed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Brunson was a bargaining chip, cynically charged as conspiring with followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic teacher living in America, once an Erdogan ally but now an enemy obsessively denounced as a terrorist. Just after Trump’s return from Helsinki, Erdogan called to follow up on their brief encounter at NATO (and later phone call) about Brunson and his “relationship” to Gulen. Erdogan also raised another favorite subject, frequently discussed withTrump: the conviction of Mehmet Atilla, a senior official of the state-run Turkish bank Halkbank, for financial fraud stemming from massive violations of our Iran sanctions. This ongoing criminal investigation threatened Erdogan himself because of allegations he and his family used Halkbank for personal purposes, facilitated further when his son-in-law became Turkey’s Finance Minister. To Erdogan, Gulen and his “movement” were responsible for the Halkbank charges, so it was all part of a conspiracy against him, not to mention against his family’s growing wealth. He wanted the Halkbank case dropped, unlikely now that US prosecutors had their hooks sunk deep into the bank’s fraudulent operations. Finally, Erdogan fretted about pending legislation in Congress that would halt the sale of F-35s to Turkey because Ankara was purchasing Russia’s S- 400 air defense system. If consummated, that purchase would also trigger mandatory sanctions against Turkey under a 2017 anti-Russia sanctions statute. Erdogan had a lot to worry about.
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