“We can see that the EU understands the defeated coup and FETO better compared to last year,” Faruk Kaymakci, Turkey’s permanent representative to the EU, told Anadolu Agency.

 Mentioning Turkey’s on-going endeavors to have FETO recognized as a terrorist organization, Kaymakci emphasized the improvement with regard to EU institutions toward an accurate understanding of FETO.

   “We see that FETO’s influence on the European Parliament (EP) as well as other EU institutions in Brussels is decreasing day by day,” Kaymakci said.

Kaymakci explained that for the EU to define a group as a terrorist organization, it needed to witness a terrorist action in any EU-member state, and for such recognition, a member state had to launch an initiative.

“It took the EU years to recognize the PKK as a terrorist organization. And this recognition came only after the PKK started inflicting harm on EU-member states,” he recalled.

“EU countries did not use to share with us enough and real-time intelligence. But after seeing for themselves that a terrorist that carried out an attack in Syria and Iraq could as well do the same in Brussels, Paris, and Barcelona, they began to closely cooperate,” he said.

Stressing that Turkey was one of the very few countries that actually put up an effective fight against Daesh on the ground, Kaymakci noted that the EU had begun to better cooperate also in regard to the Daesh threat.

“We believe that this cooperation should strengthen even more in 2018, and we are now receiving significant signals [from the EU] on that too,” he said.

On 22 March 2016, a suicide attack was carried out at Zaventem Airport and Maelbeek metro station in Brussels, killing 32 people and wounding 270 others.

    Daesh claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Separately, at least 130 people were killed and hundreds were injured after a coordinated armed Daesh attack in the French capital on November 13, 2015.