Analysts have been warning for years that Turkey’s deep and sustained support for Middle East Islamists was undermining stability throughout the region. According to a range of analysts interviewed by Reuters, the region as a whole has had enough: Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan cuts an increasingly lonely figure in...
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A car bomb exploded yesterday at a border crossing between Syria and Turkey, injuring a dozen people and heightening long-held fears that the Syrian conflict would spread to Turkey. The explosion came a day after a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Syrian military helicopter that Ankara reported had entered Turkish airspace and ignored repeated...
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Turkey continues to veto cooperation between Israel and NATO – extending a policy that stretches back years and which diplomats had hoped would cease amid a U.S.-backed reconciliation effort – according to Greek Ambassador Spiros Lampridis. Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Lampridis outlined both the scope of programs nixed by...
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Amid an a series of foreign policy misteps, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s Islamist administration scored a win last March by inking a ceasefire agreement with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK agreed to withdraw from Turkey to Iraqi Kurdistan, and in return Ankara promised to grant greater autonomy to...
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Turkish officials on Thursday leaked to Turkish media that normalization talks with Israel are going just fine: Talks to normalize frayed relations between Israel and Turkey “are on track and can be concluded at any time,” Today’s Zaman reported on Thursday, citing a Turkish official. “This should not surprise anyone....
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A breaking story from Reuters this afternoon has it that a leading Syrian military official, former Syrian Defense Minister General Ali Habib, has defected from the regime and is now in Turkey. The defection, if confirmed, will be read along multiple dimensions. Analysts seeking to evaluate the morale and readiness...
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A crisis in relations between Turkey and Egypt, driven in large measure by Turkish anger over the army deposing Egypt’s former president Mohammed Morsi, my be impacting not just Ankara’s regional position but it’s economic status. This week Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan scolded the head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar religious...
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Diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Turkey escalated today, with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu lashing out at Washington following recent criticism from U.S. officials: In an interview broadcast live on private television channel Kanal 24 late on Aug. 21, Davutoğlu said that Erdoğan targeted a mentality in his comments claiming that...
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The White House is blasting comments made by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan blaming Israel for the Egyptian military’s actions against former president Mohammed Morsi. Erdogan had discovered a 2011 video of French-Jewish intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy calling on the military to block the Brotherhood from taking power, and based on that...
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Remarkable footage emerged this week of the inside of the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which after being stormed in 1979 was partially turned by Iran into a museum for anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda. Other parts of the complex were handed over to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Western media outlets...
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