US pastor in Turkish jail while Gulen dominates talks
Turkey’s prime minister has asked the US president-elect to hand over exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen in the interest of furthering US-Turkey relations even as Ankara continues to hold American pastor Andrew Brunson on terror charges.
Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim called on US President-elect Donald Trump today to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylania-based Sunni cleric who was named as the mastermind of the July 15 coup attempt. Yildirim told a news conference that Gulen's delivery to the Turkish authorities would help improve stormy relations between the two NATO allies.
Yet just as Gulen’s presence in the United States remains a thorn in Turkish-US ties, so too does the incarceration of American pastor Andrew Brunson, whose case has gone largely unnoticed in Turkey but not in the United States.
Turkish officials who spoke on strict condition of anonymity told Al-Monitor that they had been flooded with letters about Brunson’s plight, including many from Congress.
In a stiff editorial for Fox News, Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahama aired their concerns, saying that Turkey had yet to provide compelling evidence of the pastor’s guilt.
