Before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, Saudi Arabia was bulletproof on September 11, 2001. They were a Teflon country.
Several high-ranking American officials and diplomats considered Saudi Arabia as their escape hatch. The 9/11 Commission revealed warning flags, but it hasn’t stopped American policymakers from making the same mistakes again.
19FortyFive reports that Turkey is now a breeding ground for extremism and a source of funding for international militancy. Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared moderate during his early years in office, but his current acts indicate otherwise.
Evidence from wiretapped conversations points to Erdogan’s staff assisting in arming Islamist extremists in Nigeria. Some have compared the ties between Erdogan’s government and the Islamic State to those between the Saudi government and Al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.
Once Turkish proxies seized control of northern Syrian districts like Afrin from local Kurdish authority, they became the country’s most radical recruiting grounds for ISIS and other extremist groups. This should be no surprise because Erdogan and his followers justified the Turkish invasion of northern Syria on religious grounds.
Although Ukraine has been the focus of the recent releases of classified information, the fact that the Wagner Group requested arms from Turkey is just as significant.
Saudi charities funded mosques and madrasas worldwide in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Erdogan boasts about his efforts to demolish Fethullah Gülen’s educational and institutional network, but in its place, he has promoted his own Muslim Brotherhood-inspired fanaticism, which has a darker, more Anatolian tint than Gülen’s Sufism.
Former U.S. ambassadors and defense attachés to Turkey frequently work with Turkish companies or energy companies who want to build pipelines through Turkey to transfer oil. The United States’ current relationship with Turkey raises the question of whether or not it is repeating the mistakes of its relations with Saudi Arabia in the late 20th century.
