News From Antiwar.com The Turkish press on July 1 reported that Ankara has signed an agreement with the Persian Gulf state of Qatar to allow the latter to deploy 36 military aircraft and 250 service members to Turkey. The Turkish chief of the general staff, General Yaşar Güler, was in the Qatari capital of Doha on March 2 to sign the agreement, though the news of the agreement was only disclosed on July 1 by the Hürriyet newspaper. The agreement in turn is based on a bilateral military cooperation pact signed by the two nations in 2007, three years after the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey which established the military bloc’s partnership program for Persian Gulf nations, the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. Qatar became one of the first four members (with Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates).