Turkey plans to change the name of the street where the embassy of the United Arab Emirates is located to Fakhreddin Pasha, the historical figure at the centre of a diplomatic row caused by a retweet, the state-run Anadolu agency said on Saturday.
UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahayan slandered Ottoman Pasha last week by retweeting that Ottoman forces led by Fakhreddin Pasha stole money and manuscripts from Medina in 1916 during World War One when the city was under Ottoman rule.
On Tuesday, Nahyan re-tweeted a post from an Iraqi man from Germany, according to his profile, on his official account, which said: "Did you know that in 1916, Turkish Fahreddin Pasha committed a crime against the people of Medina, stole their properties, and put them on a train en route to Damascus and Istanbul? Also the Turks stole the handwritten books in Mahmoudia Library and took them to Istanbul. This is the history of Erdoğan's ancestors and what they did to Muslim Arabs."
The post Nahyan re-tweeted accused Fahreddin Pasha, an Ottoman military governor of Medina who served from 1916 to 1919, of committing crimes against the local population, including stealing their property and the sacred relics of the Prophet Muhammad's tomb.
The post drew the ire of Ankara, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his top aide İbrahim Kalın slamming the allegations.
The mayor of the Turkish capital Ankara ordered preparations to change the name of the street where the UAE mission is located to that of the former commander and one-time governor of Medina, Anadolu Agency said.
Without naming him, Erdoğan suggested on Thursday that the UAE minister was ignorant. The UAE charge d'affaires in Ankara was also summoned to the Foreign Ministry over the issue.
The UAE, a close U.S. ally, sees Erdoğan's Islamist-rooted ruling party as a friend of Islamist forces which the UAE opposes across the Arab world.
Ties were further strained by Ankara's support for Qatar after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt imposed sanctions on the Gulf nation in June over a dispute in which the Arab states accused Doha of supporting terrorism. Doha denies this.
