Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received Erdogan at Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah on the night of April 28. After a formal reception and banquet to welcome Erdogan, the Turkish President to Jeddah, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman held a meeting with Erdogan.
“During the meeting, they reviewed the Saudi-Turkish relations and opportunities for developing them in various fields. They also discussed the latest regional and international developments and the exerted efforts towards them,” SPA published on the 29th of April.
Erdogan took charge of an event for journalists in Turkey's Ataturk Airport on April 28, moments before flying to Jeddah that same day to attend the newspaper pro-Erdogan Daily Sabah, described as a “two-day working visit” in Saudi Arabia from April 28 to April 30.
“My visit (to Saudi Arabia) is the manifestation of our common will to start a new era of cooperation as two brotherly countries,” Erdogan said to journalists at Turkey's Ataturk Airport.
“It is in our common interest to increase our cooperation with Saudi Arabia in fields such as health, energy, food security, agricultural technologies, defense industry, and finance,” the minister stated.
“We express at every occasion that we place as much importance on the stability and security of our brothers in the Gulf region as our own,” the Turkish leader said.
“Saudi Arabia holds a special place for Turkey in terms of trade and investments as well as the large-scale projects implemented by our contractors,” Erdogan declared. “The total value of the projects our contractors have undertaken in Saudi Arabia reaches $24 billion. The complementary nature of our economies is the primary factor that attracts Saudi investors to the dynamic environment in Turkey.”
“Ties between Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been strained after the killing of [Saudi] journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018,” Al Arabiya said on the 28th of April.
The owner of Amazon's Washington Post employed Khashoggi as an editor between 2017 and his demise in the fall of 2018. The journalist who was born in Mecca was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018.
Saudi Prince Bin Salman, the Crown Prince Bin Salman told The Atlantic in an interview that was published on March 3 that he believed that his right to be “innocent until proven guilty” was violated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) when it claimed he was the one who ordered Khashoggi's murder in 2018. The C.I.A. made the allegations in a classified intelligence report that was released February, 2021.
Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are majority Sunni Muslim nations. Erdogan's trip to Saudi Arabia from April 28 until April 30 falls within the time that leads up to Eid-al-Fitr. The three-day festival is a “festival of breaking the fast” in Arabic and marks the conclusion of Ramadan which can be described as an Islamic holy month that is marked by a fast from dawn to dusk.
Turkey is legally a secular nation, however the majority of its total population of around 82 million people is Muslim. Around 77.5 percent of the Muslim population practices a form of Islam called Hanafi-Sunni. Saudi Arabia's population total is estimated to be 34.2 million. “Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 21 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims,” the U.S. State Department reported in 2020, stating that around 38.3 percent of Saudi residents are non-natives.
