ISTANBUL: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to the United States next week to meet Donald Trump, the Turkish presidency said Wednesday, amid heightened tensions between the two countries.
In a telephone conversation, “the two leaders reconfirmed that they will meet in Washington on Wednesday, November 13, on President Trump’s invitation,” the Turkish presidency said.
Erdogan had threatened to cancel his visit due to disputes over the Syrian conflict and the US House of Representatives recognizing the mass killing of Armenians a century ago as genocide.
Trump issued a tweet saying he’d had a “very good call” with Erdogan and would “look forward” to hosting him.
Trump said that during the phone call, they discussed the Syrian-Turkish border, “the eradication of terrorism, the ending of hostilities with the Kurds, and many other topics.”
On the call, Erdogan also discussed the detention of the wife of the late Islamic State (IS) group leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who was killed during a US raid in Syria.
“He informed me that they have captured numerous Daesh fighters that were reported to have escaped during the conflict — including a wife and sister of terrorist killer al Baghdadi,” Trump tweeted, using an acronym for IS.
In his comments, Erdogan took a swipe at the United States, saying “we didn’t make a big fuss” about the capture of Baghdadi’s wife.
By contrast, he said, the United States “started a very big communication operation” after Baghdadi’s death.
The IS leader was killed in a US special forces operation carried out with the help of Kurdish fighters in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, just across the border from Turkey.
It came in the wake of a Turkish military offensive against the Kurdish forces, who have been a close ally of the West in the fight against IS, but are viewed as terrorists by Ankara.
Erdogan to meet Trump in Washington on Nov. 13
Erdogan to meet Trump in Washington on Nov. 13
- Trump issued a tweet saying he’d had a “very good call” with Erdogan and would “look forward” to hosting him
Islamist militants show ‘unprecedented coordination’ in Burkina Faso attacks
- The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare
- The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas
DAKAR: Islamist militants have killed dozens of soldiers and civilians and overrun an army detachment over the past week in coordinated attacks across multiple regions of Burkina Faso, according to internal reports by two diplomatic missions reviewed by Reuters.
The operations by Al Qaeda–linked Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin show the JNIM is increasingly able to mobilize across large swathes of territory at one time, said the reports, which described a list of locations and places that came under assault.
Burkina Faso’s military rulers seized power in a coup in 2022, promising to improve security. But militants’ attacks have increased in the West African country as state forces battle an insurgency that has spread across the Sahel from Mali.
The assaults were on several towns in the north and east including Bilanga, Titao, Tandjari and Nare, the diplomatic reports said. One also described an assault in the eastern city of Fada N’Gourma and flagged another in the northern Ouahigouya area.
“These attacks, which were almost simultaneous and spread across several provinces, demonstrate unprecedented coordination between militants and the junta’s inability to contain the assaults,” said one of the internal reports, which put the death toll at more than 180.
The other gave no toll but said the incidents appeared coordinated and involved several hundred militants serving JNIM and possibly Daesh affiliates.
The operations targeted military detachments, civilian convoys and market areas, it said.
JNIM has said it killed scores of troops from the Burkinabe army in attacks in the past week, US-based SITE Intelligence Group said on Monday.
Burkina authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the assaults or casualty reports.
INJURED GHANAIANS RETURN HOME
In the northern town of Titao, militants attacked an army base and set a market on fire, the internal reports said.
Nearly 80 soldiers and pro-government militia members were killed, one said. The other said about 10 civilians were killed there.
The dead civilians included eight tomato traders, Ghana’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
SITE quoted a media unit for JNIM as saying the insurgents had seized military vehicles, guns and other possessions in the assaults. More than a decade of insurgencies in the Sahel has displaced millions and engendered economic collapse, with violence pushing further south toward West Africa’s coast.
JNIM claimed nearly 500 attacks in Burkina Faso in 2025 and nearly 300 in Mali, SITE’s director, Rita Katz, said in a social media post on LinkedIn.
