This Pastor’s Plight Made Turkey’s Economic Woes Worse

Turkey and the U.S., longtime allies and fellow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have seen relations fray over an array of security and economic issues in recent years. The flare-up that sent Turkish financial markets plunging centers around the fate of an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey since 2016. U.S. President Donald Trump, saying the pastor is being unjustly detained, ordered sanctions against two Turkish government officials that, while limited in their direct effect, sent markets into a spin that hasn’t yet stopped.

Andrew Brunson is an evangelical preacher from North Carolina who has lived in Turkey for more than 20 years and led a small evangelical Presbyterian church in the city of Izmir. He was taken into custody by the local police department in October 2016, a time when the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was arresting tens of thousands of people -- including a number of other Americans -- in a crackdown following an attempted coup. Brunson is accused of having links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and to followers of Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania whom Erdogan accuses of orchestrating the coup attempt. Brunson was released to house arrest in July following almost two years of incarceration. The case against him "seems to be based on secret evidence and a secret witness," says the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which advocates for his release.