Egypt’s relations with Turkey and Syria are heating up. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri will visit these two countries with which Cairo has been in diplomatic cold for a decade, his office said on Sunday. This visit “is a message of solidarity from Egypt with these two brotherly countries after the earthquake” of February 6 which killed nearly 46,000 people in Turkey and Syria, the ministry statement said.
In the aftermath of this earthquake, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi had called his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, an unprecedented conversation between the two heads of state. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi then called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his former great enemy with whom he had exchanged his very first handshake in November at the World Cup in Qatar. The heads of Egyptian and Syrian diplomacy also spoke by telephone.
Contact resumed with Damascus
Bashar al-Assad has been diplomatically isolated, especially from the Arab scene – Syria is still suspended from the Arab League, which sits in Cairo – since the start of the repression of a popular uprising born in 2011 which degenerated into civil war. But since the earthquake that devastated Syria and Turkey, Arab countries have resumed contact and sent aid to Damascus, which could take advantage of the tragedy to break out of its diplomatic isolation, experts believe.
On Sunday, a delegation of heads of Arab parliaments was welcomed by Bashar al-Assad. Among them was the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament Hanafy El-Gabaly, described by the Egyptian state press as “the highest Egyptian leader received in Damascus” for more than a decade.
Relations have never been completely severed between Cairo and Damascus and the highest official of the Syrian security services, General Ali Mamlouk, even made his first public visit abroad in 2016 since the beginning of the war in Syria in 2011. Relations with Turkey have only warmed up very recently, while Cairo and Ankara have been cold since Abdel Fattah al-Sissi came to power in 2013, after overthrowing the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, of whom Ankara was a fervent supporter.