Pompeo Stirs Furor Over Trip Without Visit to Erdogan

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo won’t meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or other government leaders when he visits Turkey, a highly unusual situation that U.S. officials chalked up to scheduling conflicts and Turkish officials considered an insult, Bloomberg reports.

AFP reports a group of 20 to 30 Turks shouted “Yankee go home!” as the evangelical Christian Pompeo headed in for a meeting with the Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople — the spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox world — to express his “strong position” on religious freedoms.