After last month’s border attack, some hard Syrian lessons for Ankara, which has finally opened a key air base for attacks against ISIS positions.
Tag: turkey
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Modern Islam And The Disease Within
Even a country like Turkey can’t find its way into the modern era. What remains is a negative, aggressive “discount Islam” that creates problems around the world
Photo: Hamza Turkia/Xinhua/ZUMA NATO DISCUSSES TURKEY BORDER CRISIS In an emergency meeting in Brussels today, NATO is holding talks to discuss Turkey’s campaign against both ISIS and Kurdish forces across its border in Syria.Reuters reports that both NATO and Turkey are downplaying the idea of a call for military help from the alliance. “Turkey requested […]
Photo: Hani Ali/Xinhua/ZUMA TURKEY “CHANGING REGIONAL GAME” Recent Turkish strikes against both ISIS in Syria and Kurdistan Workers Party militants in northern Iraq have “changed the regional game,” Hürriyet quotes Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as saying. But he insisted Turkey wouldn’t use ground troops in the fight against ISIS. According to The New York Times, […]
Photo: T. Pyle/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA/ZUMA TURKEY TARGETS ISIS IN SYRIA In a major escalation in the fight against ISIS, Turkey returned fire early today for the first time, sending F-16 fighter jets to bomb ISIS positions across the border with Syria, killing at least 35 ISIS militants. The retaliation comes after yesterday’s clashes near the […]
Turkey is mourning the victims of this week’s suicide bombing in the city of Suruc, along the border with Syria. “Turkey cried,” Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet headlined in its Wednesday edition, along with heartbreaking images from the funeral the day before of 28 of the 32 people who died during a meeting of young Kurdish […]
QAMISHLI — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad“s smiling face beams down from a large billboard on the central artery of Qamishli, a city in northeast Syria. But further down the road towards the city’s eastern suburbs, what looks imposingly over the avenue is a portrait of a triumphant-looking Abdullah Ocalan, the anointed leader of Turkey’s Kurdish […]
From Facebook to Google, Baidu to VKontakte, the world’s biggest technology companies talk about their singular dedication to their users. Yet the road to becoming a global tech titan is inevitably lined with hard choices and conflicts of interest. Here are five prominent controversies where companies are accused of ceding to questionable demands of the […]
ANKARA — Turkey is still struggling to form a coalition government weeks after the Parliamentary elections that denied an outright majority to the ruling AKP party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But in the meantime, another pressing question has been raised in the halls of Ankara: Will Turkey enter Syria to create a so-called “buffer […]
From Hungary to Switzerland, fortifications are rising in the heart of Europe, where the once-heralded borderless zone is being diminished by the day.
President Erdogan is raising the tone about a “buffer zone” needed along the Turkish-Syrian border to halt a supposed Kurdish push for independence.
The Kurdish victory over ISIS in the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad has brought out the worst instincts from Turkey’s leaders.
ANKARA —Last Sunday’s general elections in Turkey represented nothing less than a cultural and political revolution: Not only did President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lose his parliamentary majority, but Kurdish politicians also succeeded for the first time in winning enough votes to enter parliament. The Turkish electorate’s disenchantment with its egomaniacal leader deals a blow to […]
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Extra! Erdogan Rebuked In Turkish Election
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered a major setback in yesterday’s general election, losing their parliamentary majority. While it still received more votes than any other party, losing the single-party majority bodes poorly for Erdogan’s plans to change the constitution to give the president more powers in Turkish […]
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) may not have enough seats to form a government if the main Kurdish party passes the 10% election threshold.
JERUSALEM — Three patients are sitting in the spacious waiting room at the offices of the Israeli medical tourism agency iMer. Through the large glass windows of its offices inside the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, they can see the scenic Ein Karem valley with the surrounding mountains and green forests. Despite the breathtaking biblical landscape, […]
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — Turkey’s Roboski military outpost became infamous as the location of the 2011 bombing that killed 34 Kurdish youth, whom Turkish fighter pilots had mistaken for PKK rebel troops. Now we see the latest news about Turkish soldiers killing mules, not men, in the same area near the Turkey-Iraq border. According to Ferhat […]
TEL AVIV ― Annual results for 2014 for Israeli tourism companies, hotels and airlines are not good, though few are surprised. Every sector linked to the travel and tourist industry is losing money due to the consequences of last summer’s conflict in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had approved a measure that promised that […]
Kurds, persecuted by the Turkish state, are only now beginning to face the role they played in the mass execution of Armenians a century ago.
Cumhuriyet, April 7, 2015 “Half Democracy,” Tuesday’s front page of Turkey’s center-left daily Cumhuriyet reads, after the government imposed a nationwide ban on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook Monday. The accompanying picture depicts a man divided between “CENSORSHIP” and “VIOLENCE.” Turkish authorities have now lifted the ban, which had been implemented in an attempt to prevent […]
Despite death threats, three young Syrians are fighting the jihadists terrorizing their country with the only weapon they have: pure mockery.
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Fields Of Yore
On our way to Ürgüp and its strange rocks, we drove past a couple of field workers. The whole scene threw me back to my childhood, when I would watch farmers harvest in eastern France.
The Turkish government still sees the downfall of the Assad regime as the No. 1 priority. Washington is most concerned with the battle against ISIS. Is there room for an alliance?
U.S., UK HACKED SIM CARD PROVIDERThe NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ illegally hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer, and stole encryption keys to facilitate eavesdropping on global cellular communications, The Intercept reports. The documents, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that intelligence agencies have therefore been […]
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Appointed Chairman
Who needs a moving truck?
Animosity towards immigrants is strong in Hungary. Controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban was particularly blunt during a recent television interview: “We don’t want immigrants in our country.” But it was also notable that Orban was speaking from Paris, where he participated in the Jan. 11 unity march after Islamist terrorists murdered members of the magazine […]
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — The Turkish authorities all condemned the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet for publishing selections from Charlie Hebdo. From the president to the prime minister, from ministers to parliamentary deputies, the government was united in condemning the Turkish newspaper. Insulting the sacred is unacceptable, they said. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda led demonstrations at mosques around the country, […]
ISTANBUL — Instead of discussing the Paris massacres and the ties between Islam and terrorism, Turkey has instead been focused on “Islamophobia.” Someone not following the news could mistakenly believe, based on the debate here, that there had been a violent attack against Muslims in France instead of a jihadist terrorist attack against journalists, Jews […]
The rising battle between the forces of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and exiled imam Fethullah Gulen is a high-stakes power struggle. But some in Turkey want no part of it.
Words that made news …
ISTANBUL — The Kurds’ current battle against the Islamist forces of ISIS in the border city of Kobani is just the latest in a long, hard struggle for the Kurdish people in the regions that encompass modern Syria. An estimated 8% of Syria’s 20 million citizens are Kurds; and except for some Yazidi clans, all […]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees enemies everywhere: Assad, Kurds, but not the murderous Islamist radical group just across the border in Syria.
Diyarbakir, the “Kurdish capital” of Turkey, is living in fear of the ISIS jihadists who have gained ground across the Syrian border in Kobani. But there is also the old enemy: Ankara.
Complaints about Ankara’s inaction have come from the West and Kurds. But Turkey’s regional ambitions may very well push it into Syria to crush ISIS. The risk could be huge.
On the Turkish border, at a refugee camp where Kurds from the Syrian town of Kobani are taking refuge, the displaced wonder why Turkey and the West aren’t arming them against ISIS.
One slipped away, the other killed his way out of ISIS after witnessing too much brutality from the jihadist group. But as they tell their dramatic stories, sharp differences emerge.
At 1,000 rooms and a $350 million pricetag, the vast new palace the Turkish president has had built for himself is both illegal and a bold expression of his own power and that of the “new Turkey.”
Turkey’s fraught relationship with Europe and the U.S. should be bolstered by its impressive response to the refugee crisis in neighboring Syria. But now will the West step up?
-Analysis- One year since taking office, Iran President Hassan Rouhani and his government are confronted with an extremely unstable geopolitical situation across the Middle East. Tehran had long been seen as the main beneficiary of the 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq, but it must now face unexpected difficulties in its neighboring country and former sworn […]