President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi was expected to arrive in Ankara on 4 September — after Al-Ahram Weekly went to press — for a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It will be their second summit since relations between Ankara and Cairo began to thaw after the decade-long diplomatic rift that followed the 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi as president of Egypt.

In February this year, Cairo hosted Erdogan on his first visit to Egypt since 2012. The summit-level meetings between Al-Sisi and Erdogan marked the culmination of intensive diplomatic and security work after Cairo and Ankara decided that they had more economic and political interests in common than ideological divides.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan visited Cairo on 4 and 5 August and during a press conference with his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty both ministers committed to pushing common interests, particularly on the economic front.

To promote economic and political relations with Turkey, President Al-Sisi is being accompanied by a large delegation of officials and members of the business community. Government sources in Egypt confirmed that the two heads of state will oversee the signing of cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding upgrading energy, industrial, tourism, and trade cooperation. The Egyptian-Turkish Business Council is also planning a meeting on the sidelines of the Al-Sisi-Erdogan summit to coincide with the re-launch of the Egyptian-Turkish Strategic Cooperation Council. The meeting will focus on boosting bilateral trade cooperation.

Without confirming the Egyptian purchase of Turkish-made drones which was reported in the Turkish press this week, the same sources said defence cooperation was likely to be high on the agenda of the Al-Sisi-Erdogan summit. The Turkish press also reported that Egypt International Aviation Week, scheduled to open on 3 September, would be the venue for the unveiling of a twin-seat supersonic Turkish-made fighter jet.

“I think we are seeing a major shift in relations between the two countries towards wider strategic cooperation, including defence cooperation and the joint management of regional conflicts in the Red Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Libya and Gaza,” said one source. He added that the differences that once divided Cairo and Ankara on these files have narrowed.

As a sign of this narrowing, he cited Cairo’s decision to open up to the west Libya-based government of Abdul-Hamid Dbeibeh, Ankara’s opening up to east Libya-based powerbroker Khalifa Haftar and the end of Turkey’s open hostility to the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria which is viewed by Cairo as a source of relative stability and guarantor of Syria’s territorial integrity.

Following a Russian-mediated reconciliation, senior Syrian and Turkish officials now speak openly of their willingness to promote stronger ties between Damascus and Ankara and last month Erdogan said that he could soon invite Al-Assad to the Turkish capital. Al-Assad, meanwhile, told the Syrian parliament that he is not insisting on a total withdrawal of Turkish and Turkish-backed troops from the northern part of Syria where they hold a swathe of Syrian territory.

“This year’s Al-Sisi and Erdogan summits underline a shift in regional priorities in both Cairo and Ankara,” said the source. He noted that Turkey has opted to abandon its attempts to expand Ankara’s power across the region — “something that Erdogan had promised to deliver to mark 100 years since the end of the Ottoman rule” — and that Egypt had moved its regional relations “away from the dominating concern over who was and who was not on board when political changes unfolded in the summer of 2013.”

Between 2013 and 2021, Egypt and Turkey took opposing positions on a host of regional issues. Egypt coordinated closely with the UAE and Saudi Arabia to counterbalance the growth of Islamism while Turkey and Qatar did the opposite. In 2017, when Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain imposed an embargo on Qatar, Turkey supported Qatar until the embargo was dropped, with US support and Kuwaiti mediation, in 2021.

A year later, Qatar hosted the first, albeit abrupt, handshake between Al-Sisi and Erdogan on the sidelines of the closing ceremony of the World Cup in autumn 2022.

Egyptian and Cairo-based diplomatic sources agree that today Egypt’s regional concerns align more with Qatar and Turkey than with the UAE and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia.

Cairo, Doha, and Ankara, say diplomatic sources, share similar views on the need to end the war and how this should be done. Qatar and Egypt are heavily involved in mediating a ceasefire deal, along with the US, and the three capitals have been using their influence with Hamas leaders to push forward a deal.

“We are more in agreement with Qatar than Turkey and on how the war started and what the Palestinians could have been spared had Hamas not launched the 7 October operation which handed Israel a pretext to start a war that has all but rendered Gaza unlivable,” said one Egyptian source.

He added that Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and the “explosive dynamic” in the West Bank is likely to top the agenda of the Al-Sisi-Erdogan talks, and that the two leaders will announce a joint position on ending the war. They will also discuss post-war scenarios for the political management of Gaza and its reconstruction.

On Monday, Saudi and Turkish press reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman had called both Al-Sisi and Erdogan to discuss the situation in Gaza and ways to push forward to a ceasefire.

Egyptian sources say Al-Sisi will raise a number of issues pertaining to security in the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean in light of the defence pacts Egypt and Turkey recently signed with Somalia and both countries’ strategic influence in the area. Al-Sisi will also discuss the latest developments with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the ongoing diplomatic confrontation between Cairo and Addis Ababa in the wake of the fifth filling of the dam’s reservoir.

The summit is being held as Turkey seeks to reduce tensions with neighbouring Iraq following the launch of a pact setting new rules for the management of Turkish concerns over Kurdish militant groups, and as Ankara seeks to open up to the European Union.

Turkey’s foreign minister is expected to arrive in Brussels for rapprochement talks after a five-year hiatus in meetings with the EU.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly