"Turkey is an extremely important country for NATO."
Modern.az reports that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said this during an interview with "Anadolu" agency.
Mark Rutte highly appreciated the weight of official Ankara within NATO:
"Turkey is an extremely important and critical country for NATO. Although it is not one of the founding members of the Alliance, it joined only 3 years after its establishment. It has been a part of this family almost from the very beginning. Today, Turkey has one of the strongest armies in NATO. The Turkish Armed Forces are highly equipped and very well trained."
The Secretary General emphasized that Turkey's local military industry has become an innovation center in the global arena:
"It is a great advantage that Turkey has a huge defense industry infrastructure consisting of approximately 3,000 companies. These large, medium and small-sized enterprises attach special importance to innovations and develop the most modern technologies. For example, they immediately reflect the experiences gained directly from the battlefield in the Ukraine war in their production. This flexibility makes the Turkish defense industry extremely strong.
For this very reason, we made a firm decision to hold the NATO Defense Industry Forum in Ankara on July 7. Our goal is to demonstrate the overall defense industry strength not only of Turkey but of NATO as a whole. Turkey hosting such a prestigious forum is the most correct choice."
