Turkey, Egypt fully restore diplomatic ties after decade-long freeze 

ANKARA — Turkey and Egypt announced on Tuesday the full normalization of relations, ending nearly a decade of diplomatic hostility. 

In separate simultaneous statements, both countries said that they decided to reinstate their ambassadors mutually in their respective capitals, fully restoring ties at the highest diplomatic level. Turkey named Salih Mutlu Sen as its ambassador to Cairo and Egypt tapped Amr Elhamamy as its envoy to Ankara, according to the joint statements.

Speaking at a joint presser with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi, Turkey's new Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Turkey and Egypt were two powerful countries of the region and that they do not have the "luxury of staying apart" from each other. "We have now passed an important stage in the normalization efforts. From now on, our relations will continue to progress swiftly in political, economic and other fields," he said.

The two countries severed their diplomatic ties following the 2013 coup that ousted Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government of late President Mohamed Morsi. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged as one of the major international backers of the anti-coup demonstrator with his country turning to a safe haven for the exiled Brotherhood members. 

As part of its regional fence mending push started back in 2021, Turkey has extended several olive branches to its former regional rivals, namely, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Egypt. Though the country has managed to improve its relations with the four Middle Eastern powers including fully normalizing its ties with Israel, Egypt has long been dragging its feet against a full normalization with its Eastern Mediterranean neighbor mainly due to Ankara's staunch support of the Brotherhood. The two capitals are also at odds over the Libyan conflict and what Cairo describes as Ankara's revisionist policies in the Arab world as part of Erdogan's neo-Ottoman ambitions in the region.   

Meetings between the two capitals remained limited to technical level contacts except a brief meeting between Erdogan and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi late last year on the margins of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, until the Feb. 6 twin earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey. 

Following the first phone call between Erdogan and Sisi as part of the post-disaster diplomacy, Shoukry paid a solidarity visit to Turkey's quake zone in late February, meeting with the top Turkish diplomat. Then Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu then became the first Turkish foreign minister to visit Cairo since 2012. Shoukry traveled to Turkey again last week, but the two chief diplomats stopped short of announcing full restoration during that visit. The two capitals decided to work on the full normalization process during that trip last month.