Bahçeli visits ex-chief’s tomb
ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News
‘I hope I will perform my bayram prayer in Kirkuk in the coming years’ Bahçeli says. AA photo
Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli visited the grave of his party’s founder, Alpaslan Türkeş, yesterday for the first day of the Ramadan bayram holiday after a planned visit to the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk was nixed by Baghdad.“We had planned to spend the Ramadan bayram holiday in the city of Turkmens, Kirkuk. But Allah did not will it. I hope I will perform my bayram prayer in Kirkuk in the coming years,” Bahçeli told reporters after performing his bayram prayer in Ankara. Bahçeli and a large delegation had planned to meet with Iraqi Turkmens in Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed and oil-rich city in northern Iraq, for the holiday. However, Iraq refused to grant a visa to the MHP delegation due to the deterioration in Turkish-Iraqi ties after Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s surprise visit to the same city earlier in August.
