ISTANBUL, April 15: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday urged dozens of Muslim leaders gathered for a summit in Istanbul to end sectarian divisions in the Islamic world and join forces to fight terror.
Turkey is seeking to showcase its influence among the world s estimated 1.7 billion Muslims, particularly in lands once controlled by the Ottoman Empire, at the two-day summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which it will chair for the next two years.
But the meeting bringing together over 30 heads of state and government has been shadowed by sectarian-tinged conflicts in Syria and Yemen that have pitted Shia Muslims — led by regional power Iran — against Sunni Muslim powers like Saudi Arabia.
Key guests at the summit included Saudi King Salman and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in a rare public encounter although there were reports the two men had exchanged words.
“I believe the greatest challenge we need to surmount is sectarianism. My religion is not that of Sunnis, of Shiites. My religion is Islam,” Erdogan said in his opening speech.
“We should be uniting. Out of the conflicts, the tyranny, only the Muslims suffer,” he said, adding the summit meeting could be a “turning point” for the whole Islamic world.
Erdogan lashed out at Islamic State (IS) jihadists who seized swathes of Syria and Boko Haram Islamist extremists in Nigeria as two “terrorist organisations that are serving the same evil purpose.”
He said that the OIC had accepted a Turkish proposal to set up a multinational police coordination centre for Islamic states to fight militants, to be based in Istanbul.
“We need to establish an organisation to further strengthen cooperation in the fight against terror,” he said.
A security lockdown has been thrown around the summit venue in Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire from where the Sultans for centuries ruled Muslims from the Balkans to Arabia.
Some 5,000 extra police have been deployed in Istanbul to ensure the event passes smoothly after two deadly suicide attacks blamed on jihadists in Istanbul this year alone.
But Turkey s own policies in the Middle East have been controversial, with several Muslim states objecting to the Islamic-rooted government s backing of rebels in Syria.-AFP
