NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday he spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently and agreed to convene a high-level meeting in Brussels next week on Sweden’s application to join the Alliance.

Foreign ministers, the national security advisors and the chiefs of intelligence agencies from the two countries will sit down and address outstanding issues to find a way forward, Stoltenberg told a press conference after meeting the Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov at NATO headquarters.

“My message continues to be that Sweden has delivered on all its obligations, including the obligations that Sweden, Turkiye and Finland agreed on at the NATO Summit in Madrid, last year,” he said.

Replying to a question on the latest burning of the Quran in Stockholm yesterday, Stoltenberg said “I understand the emotion and the depth of feeling this causes.” “Actions taken that are offensive and objectionable are not necessarily illegal in sovereign legal systems. We have also seen protests against both Turkiye and NATO over the last weeks in Sweden. I do not like them, but I defend the right to disagree,” he said.

“What is important for me is that we have to make progress on finalising the accession of Sweden into the Alliance,” Stoltenberg added.

Meanwhile, media reports said the Turkish President strongly condemned the despicable Quran-burning act saying “we will eventually teach Western monuments of arrogance that insulting Muslims’ sacred values is not freedom of thought”.

Erdogan hinted that Turkey may not lift its objections on Sweden to join NATO.

“We will put forward our reaction in the strongest possible way until there is a concerted effort to combat the enemies of Islam as well as terrorist organizations,” he was quoted saying to members of his Justice and Development Party.

The Quran-burning incident occurred on the first day of the Eid al-Adha festival.

According to media reports, Swedish police allowed the protest outside a mosque in central Stockholm citing freedom of speech after a court overturned a ban on a similar Quran-burning.

Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO last year following Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. Finland joined the Alliance in April but Turkey vetoed Sweden’s application.

Turkey accuses Sweden of not doing enough to stop anti-Islam demonstrations in the country and of supporting terrorist organizations, in particular Kurdish groups which are waging a deadly insurgency since decades in Turkey.

Source: Kuwait News Agency