Turkey realigning ties with Egypt and Gulf rivals | Al Jazeera

Turkish and Egyptian officials will gather around a table on Tuesday amid a thaw in relations between Turkey and its Arab neighbours after nearly a decade of mutual distrust and often outright hostility.

The Ankara meeting at the deputy foreign minister level is the second round of Turkey-Egypt talks following May’s Cairo summit, which had been the first direct high-level discussions between the countries since 2013.

The contact is the latest between Turkey and the Arab states it fell out with in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, which saw anti-government movements across the Middle East and North Africa unseat a number of longtime rulers and threaten others.

Turkey, which backed groups close to the Muslim Brotherhood, saw its chance to seize a leading role in the region and pressed Arab regimes to reform in the face of popular protest.

Instead, many of those it supported suffered setbacks and Ankara found itself isolated.