Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become the longest-serving leader in the history of the Turkish Republic. He has been a controversial yet dominant figure in Turkish politics since 2003 holding various positions including prime minister and president. In the runoff election held on May 15, neither Erdogan nor his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was able to secure the necessary 50% of the[Read More…]
American presidents have habitually kowtowed to Turkish demands. However, President Trump’s business investments in Turkey, Turkish-tainted associates, and baffling deference to President Erdogan spawned an exceptionally troubling record. That record could provide additional fodder for Trump’s Republican, Democratic, and Justice Department (DOJ) foes, especially as Turkey remains a rogue NATO member and supporter of international terrorism. Below is a mere[Read More…]
Welcome to bizarro world. That’s where Turkey, a notorious state sponsor of international terrorism, has the sheer gall to accuse Finland and Sweden of supporting terrorists. Even more bizarre: Neither Finland, Sweden, the U.S., NATO, EU, nor any country or leader has, to my knowledge, pointed out Ankara’s glaring hypocrisy. Turkey claims that Finland and Sweden host members of the PKK, the[Read More…]
President Putin has been making some astonishing demands, including: NATO mustn’t admit additional countries near Russia, such as Ukraine and Georgia. NATO must cease military activity in non-NATO territories: Georgia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and parts of eastern Europe. Yet, incredibly, Putin has himself been enabling a NATO member’s aggression bordering Russia. In 2020, the Kremlin embraced Turkey’s sending[Read More…]
Protests were held in Turkey’s largest city Istanbul and the capital Ankara on Nov. 23 after the lira’s historic crash. Protesters were demanding the resignation of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government over skyrocketing inflation. The protests come amid an escalating currency crisis. The Turkish lira has gone from $0.1 to $0.078 in value just over the past week,[Read More…]
Turkey’s state-controlled top religious authority has conditionally endorsed usury in a ruling that is likely to fuel debate about concepts of Islamic finance and could weaken President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to garner religious soft power by projecting Turkey as a leader defending Muslim causes. The ruling, issued by the Directorate of Religious Affairs or Diyanet that is part of[Read More…]
A projected sharp reduction in trade between the United States and China in the next two years coupled with moves to diversify supply chains potentially position Turkey alongside Vietnam, Mexico, Taiwan and Poland as competitors in efforts to reduce dependency on the People’s Republic, according to a just published study. The study, conducted by the Boston Consulting Group on behalf[Read More…]
The United Arab Emirates may have the upper hand in its competition with Turkey in efforts to shape Palestinian politics. Similarly, the UAE’s recognition of the Jewish state gives it a leg up in ensuring that its voice is heard in Israel and Washington irrespective of who wins the November US election. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t miss a[Read More…]
The intended target of the UAE-Israel alliance is not Iran but Turkey, whose regional clout poses a threat to Gulf rulers, says David Hearst, the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. In an article titled – A new message resounds in the Arab world: Get Ankara – Hearst wrote Saturday: Israel had been saying for some time to Arab diplomats[Read More…]
The real ‘Turkish-Delight’ was into its consonance as Turkey President Tayyip Erdogan, on August 21, 2020 announced the discovery of large reserves of oil/gas and hydrocarbons in Mediterranean sea 1 and with it obviously the objective of ‘blue-homeland’ of Turley has started to be counted inside Turkish populace as it has started to hit everyone’s imagination that Turkey is soon[Read More…]
The world is dangerously heading towards a war which eventually has the likelihood to change into a world-war. There are now conflict zones getting ‘more aggravated’ owing to geo-political needs and there is a growing tension between Greece-Turkey in the Mediterranean sea, since at least a month and there are all out chances that it may turn out to be[Read More…]
There are conflict zones or rather war-zones fast developing in the world right now. India is facing Pakistan in Kashmir, China in Ladakh and China is facing US, Japan, Australia, Indonesia and Taiwan in its South China sea, Middle-East is on the boil since a long time, precisely after Iraq was torn to pieces, thereafter Syria became the target where[Read More…]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened reprisals if anyone attacks the ship surveying disputed waters in the Mediterranean for oil and gas, after two French jets flew nearby during an exercise with the Greek fleet. “We said that if you attack our Oruc Reis you will pay a high price, and they got their first answer today,” Erdogan said[Read More…]
Washington, DC: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is considering converting the Hagia Sophia to a Mosque, which has been a museum since its conquest. As Muslims, we appeal to President Erdogan to keep it as a Museum, and not convert it to a Mosque. “Hagia Sophia was one of the largest Christian Cathedral in the Eastern Roman Empire for 1000 years,[Read More…]
Financial injections by Qatar and possibly China may resolve Turkey’s immediate economic crisis, aggravated by a politics-driven trade war with the United States, but are unlikely to resolve the country’s structural problems, fuelled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s counterintuitive interest rate theories. The latest crisis in Turkey’s boom-bust economy raises questions about a development model in which countries like China[Read More…]
Any doubts that Turkey’s involvement in the conflict against Islamic State is purely symbolic were dispelled by a latest round of air strikes against Kurdish positions in northeast Syria and Iraq’s Sinjar region, killing at least 20 fighters. (The number from Ankara is a more inflated 70). Iraqi government officials were flawed by the action, infuriated by its audacity; the[Read More…]
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sunday (April 16) achieved victory in a historic referendum on a package of constitutional amendments that will introduce presidential form of government like France and the United States. In a press conference in Istanbul following his party’s declaration of victory, Erdoğan said that unofficial results showed there were about 25m yes votes, 1.3m[Read More…]
The rift between the European Union and Turkey is escalating as President Erdogan has accused the EU countries of persecuting Muslims like Jews were during World War II while the spirit of fascism was running wild on the streets of Europe. The EU-Turkey rift was sparked on March 11when Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, was barred from landing in the[Read More…]
Since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla[Read More…]
The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was shot in the back and killed Monday (12/19) by a sacked police officer who shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo” and “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire. The ambassador was giving a speech at an Ankara art gallery. Reuters news agency reported: “A video showed the attacker shouting: “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!”[Read More…]
Turkey’s Prime Minister and armed forces both accused the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad Thursday of conducting an airstrike on Turkish troops in the vicinity of al-Bab in the country’s north, resulting in three casualties. The incident threatens to escalate already sharp tensions between Ankara and Damascus into all-out war, posing the very real risk of direct clashes between the[Read More…]
The threat of the US military intervention in Iraq and Syria erupting into a far wider war has increased sharply in the wake of a series of Turkish air strikes against Syrian Kurdish militia forces that are aligned with Washington. The Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reported that Turkish war planes carried out 26 strikes against[Read More…]
The attempted coup and its aftermath in Turkey on July 15th have provoked heated debate on its meaning and ramifications. The will of the Turkish people to unflinchingly defend their democratic experiment, regardless of the particular regime or leader in power, has been remarkable. Nevertheless, critics are pointing to the Turkish leader Erdogan’s heavy-handed tactics to consolidate power afterwards, involving[Read More…]
Under the pretext of “strengthening Turkey’s security by clearing terrorist groups from the border and maintaining Syria’s territorial integrity,” the Turkish army launched a major escalation of the war in Syria on Wednesday with a cross-border operation codenamed Euphrates Shield. Turkish units began their assault on ISIS and Kurdish militia forces at 4 AM local time, backed by tanks and[Read More…]
Following last week’s threats by Washington to attack Syrian government war planes bombing US-backed Kurdish forces in the northern Syrian town of Hasakeh, Turkey has launched artillery barrages against both ISIS fighters and Kurdish militia in and near the Syrian border town of Jarablus. Turkey claims shells that fell Monday on its border towns of Karkamis and Kilis were fired[Read More…]
Fifty-one people died and 69 were injured Saturday when a horrific suicide bombing hit a Kurdish wedding in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the border with Syria. At least 17 of the wounded are severely injured and clinging to life. The pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) has confirmed that one of its members was getting married at the wedding.[Read More…]
It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors the militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of Geneva Accords and the consequent withdrawal[Read More…]
So many would like this to happen – to see Turkey go, to leave NATO, to break its psychological, political and economic dependency on the West. Now that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies are quarreling with the United States and the EU, there is suddenly great hope that Turkey may thoroughly re-think its position in the world, strengthen its[Read More…]
On Tuesday, August 9, 2016, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in St. Petersburg to hold talks with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was Erdogan’s first foreign visit since the July 15 abortive coup against his elected government. St. Petersburg is Putin’s hometown. Addressing a joint press conference after the talk, Putin said: “I believe that we have all the necessary prerequisites[Read More…]
Erdoganism is a new terminology introduced by the opinion writers against President Tayyib Erdogan who has launched a cleansing operation in the civil and military bureaucracy in the aftermath of July 15 abortive coup blamed on the US-based pro-Israel cleric, Fatehullah Gulen who is described by Pape Escobar as a CIA asset. Tufail Ahmed, Director, of the Washington-based South Asia[Read More…]
Events in Turkey just become stranger with each passing day. We now have Middle Eastern and Persian sources, cited by Russian and German papers, that Russia’s security agencies overheard helicopter radio transmissions by the coup participants, and President Putin warned Erdogan about what was happening, likely saving his skin. If true, this would help explain the apparent ineptness of the[Read More…]
On Wednesday, July 20, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency in Turkey in order to hunt down all those deemed to be behind an attempted coup. The state of emergency was needed “in order to remove swiftly all the elements of the terrorist organization involved in the coup attempt,” he told a press conference. Turkey has[Read More…]
A few weeks after the dawn of the third anniversary of the Gezi resistance (uprising), the popular non-violence movement spreads countrywide in 2013, and the people of Turkey have had an experience the “military coup”. Hundreds were dead, thousands were arrested and put behind bars. The leaders around the world rushed to condemn those conspirators behind the coup while enhancing[Read More…]
The unsuccessful coup in Turkey is a matter of great relief to the Turkish people and world at large. The coup has been widely condemned even the HDP party and the government of Iran have condemned the coup attempt. Why did the coup take place? There are domestic and regional factors behind it. President Erdogan in the recent time has[Read More…]
A military coup attempt in Turkey on Friday night has left at least 60 people dead and hundreds injured. Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose whereabouts had been unknown for hours after the plotters claimed to have taken control of Tukey flew into Istanbul Ataturk Airport from an undisclosed location early Saturday and said that the coup was failing. Speaking[Read More…]
Hyped emotions, and political opportunism aside, the Israel-Turkey normalization deal, signed on June 27 is unfavorable for Palestinians – and for Gazans, in particular. There is much that is being said to blame Turkey or placate the damage of seeing Turkey – which has for years been one of the most visible backers of Palestinian Resistance – reaching out to Israel. Yet, no amount of[Read More…]
The month of Ramadan witnessed unspeakable carnage in three Muslim cities in three different countries. On 28 June 2016, 41 people, both locals and foreigners were killed in shootings and suicide bombings at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. On 2nd July, 20 people taken hostage by militants in an upmarket restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh were shot andmurdered. On the 3rd of[Read More…]
At least 36 people were killed and 147 injured when suicide attackers opened fire and blew themselves up at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday night, in the latest in a string of terrorist attacks in Turkey. Shortly before 10 p.m. two gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at a security checkpoint outside Istanbul’s Ataturk airport and then detonated their explosives.[Read More…]
Turkey has announced to restore its diplomatic relations with Israel almost after six years gap. Turkish President Erdogan has also tendered an apology to Russia for the downing of a Russian SU-24 plane in last November, after which Russian President Putin had taken strong steps with respect to Turkey. Sanctions were put on Turkey causing a lot of harm to[Read More…]
Erdogan’s diploma-problem could turn out to have considerable global significance. If his diploma-problem fades away, then Turkey’s dictatorship will be established quite firmly, and Turkey’s Constitution will be empty verbiage, but Erdogan’s supporters will probably be even more passionate for him than they now are, because of their fears of the demons that he trumpets: Kurds, Shiites, etc. He’s an ordinary tyrant, in an extraordinary position, and thus is a tyrant with extraordinarily many foreign allies. That might pull him through.
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Breadcrumb 
Three Indian Movies win TIFF 2023 Awards 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
