Last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey would not extradite Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who was sentenced to death in absentia by an Iraqi court.
As BBC News reported, Hashemi dismissed the charges against him as “politically motivated.” The most senior Sunni official in Iraq’s predominantly Shiite government, Hashemi was accused of running Sunni death squads.
The incident was the latest in a series of recent flare-ups between Ankara and Baghdad.