Title: Turkey Supports Finland and Sweden's NATO Membership Bid

The Finnish presidency announced that Turkey has supported the candidacies of Finland and Sweden to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while the alliance announced that it has accepted the membership of the two countries. The leaders of the three countries, along with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, held a meeting ahead of the NATO summit scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, in the Spanish capital, Madrid. The Turkish Anadolu Agency reported that the discussions focused on several issues, primarily the membership requests submitted by Sweden and Finland to join NATO. Previously, Ankara had announced its rejection of the two countries' NATO membership applications and set several conditions for lifting Turkey's veto, the most important of which is for both countries to cease what Turkey describes as support for terrorism, as they accuse them of harboring militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, an organization that Ankara classifies as a terrorist group.