Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he would visit Saudi Arabia next month as the rival Middle Eastern powers look to overcome years of tensions that peaked after the 2018 killing of a prominent Saudi journalist in Istanbul.
“At the moment, he is expecting me in February,” Mr. Erdogan said in a video shared online on Monday. “He promised, and I will visit Saudi Arabia in February,” Mr. Erdogan said in apparent reference to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
There was no immediate confirmation of Mr. Erdogan’s planned visit by Saudi Arabia.
A once unimaginable encounter between the leaders of Turkey and Saudi Arabia would signal a detente in a rift that has divided the Middle East for years. The meeting offers a chance to put behind them problems that have poisoned the relationship between two of the region’s biggest economies, foremost among them the killing and dismemberment of writer Jamal Khashoggi by a team of Saudi government operatives inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate.
Middle East diplomats say they are talking to rivals shunned for years amid uncertainty over the Biden administration’s commitment to the region following the U.S.’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer and its foreign-policy pivot toward China.
The end of a rift last year between Qatar—a Turkish ally—and Gulf neighbors including Saudi Arabia helped jump-start a flurry of diplomacy reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East, amid fear of collapse in the nuclear talks between world powers and Iran, another regional heavyweight.
Mr. Erdogan and the Saudi crown prince have been looking to meet for several weeks, people familiar with the efforts have said. Qatari officials unsuccessfully tried to get the two men together in Doha last month, when they both passed through within a day of each other.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2017.
Photo: Presidency Press Service/Associated Press
For Mr. Erdogan, the calculus may be more about money than geopolitics: With Turkey gripped by a currency crisis, he has been looking for economic lifelines. Officials from the United Arab Emirates in November promised investments worth billions of dollars after Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan visited Ankara. Talks with Riyadh could help end an unofficial Saudi boycott of Turkish goods in place for about a year.
Meanwhile, Prince Mohammed wants a promise that Mr. Erdogan won’t ever mention Mr. Khashoggi’s death again and will prevail upon Turkish media to stop dredging up the topic, regional officials have said.
Mr. Khashoggi was a U.S. resident and former royal insider who had criticized the crown prince in Washington Post columns. A U.S. intelligence assessment released last year by President Biden determined that Prince Mohammed had ordered the operation that led to his death, which Riyadh denies.
In the weeks following Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, Turkish media close to Mr. Erdogan leaked details that undermined the official Saudi narrative and sparked intense international criticism of the crown prince, prompting the kingdom’s biggest diplomatic crisis in a generation.
A secretive trial in Saudi Arabia resulted in the conviction of eight low-level officials in 2019. A Turkish trial in absentia has made little progress.
Write to Stephen Kalin at [email protected]
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