Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for his first visit in 11 years, after a diplomatic dispute that lasted for about a decade against the backdrop of political developments in Egypt.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi received his Turkish counterpart at Cairo Airport, amid an official ceremony before they held discussions at the Ittihadiya Presidential Palace.

During a joint press conference, the Egyptian President said: “We are opening with Turkey a new page between our two countries, which will enrich our bilateral relations and put them on the right track.”

He added: “We will seek to raise trade exchange between Egypt and Turkey to $15 billion in the coming years,” and “We are interested in strengthening joint coordination and benefiting from the two countries’ position as centers of gravity in the region.”

For his part, the Turkish President said: “We share with Egypt a common history that extends back more than a thousand years,” and expressed his happiness “to be in Cairo again after a long time.”

He indicated that the level of cooperation between the two countries has been raised to a high-level strategic cooperation council, whose first meeting will be held on the sidelines of Sisi’s planned visit to Ankara next April.

Over the past decade, the two countries have been on lines of contact over thorny regional issues, especially in Libya with each side of the conflicting forces in the country, and the dispute over Turkey’s energy exploration in the eastern Mediterranean region.

The two countries restored diplomatic relations in the summer of 2023, amid growing political rapprochement since 2021, before Sisi and Erdogan met for the first time, with the support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad, on the sidelines of the opening of the World Cup on November 20, 2022.

Despite the severing of relations in 2013, against the backdrop of political squabbling as a result of Ankara’s position on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt and Turkey maintained stable economic relations, translated into a trade exchange worth $7.7 billion in 2022, according to data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics. Egyptian.