Following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave an interview with Al Jazeera explaining that "President al-Sisi has nothing to do with democracy, and that he’s killed thousands of his own people." The remarks were condemned by Egypt’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid saying that the Turkish president "keeps confusing matter and is losing the ability to make sound judgments" and that this reflects "the difficult circumstances the Turkish president has been through. "He cannot differentiate between an evident revolution where more than 30 million Egyptians demanded the support of the Egyptian military and between military coups as we know them," the statement explained.