Turkey Places Bounty on Mohammad Dahlan, Exiled Palestinian

Turkey is offering a $700,000 reward for information leading to the capture of exiled Palestinian Mohammad Dahlan, who currently lives in the United Arab Emirates. Ankara has accused the former high-ranking Fatah official of conducting subversive acts on behalf of Abu Dhabi, including playing a role in the October 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Dahlan has also been blamed for involvement in the 2016 failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and therefore will be placed on Turkey’s list of most-wanted terrorists. The country’s foreign minister further charged that the UAE was attempting to replace Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with Dahlan, his bitter rival, who fled Ramallah in 2011 after being ousted from the ruling Fatah faction over claims that he had poisoned Yasser Arafat. Dahlan, who previously served as the head of the security services in the Gaza Strip, had already fallen out of favor with Abbas following Hamas’s violent eviction of Fatah from the Palestinian enclave in a 2007 internecine conflict. In response to Turkey’s move, Dahlan fired back by claiming that Erdogan supports “terrorist groups” in Syria, has stolen gold from Libya’s central bank and acts “as if he were commander of the [Islamic] faithful.”