The corruption scandal rocking Turkey shows no signs of abatement. Already dozens of high ranking officials and their close associates have either resigned, been jailed, or brought into questioning. The New York Times reports that even Erdogan’s own son appears to have been summoned for questioning. In the ensuing counteroffensive launched by the Erdogan administration […]
Last month, a massive corruption scandal rocked Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s political legitimacy. Believed to have been initiated by the Fethullah Gulen, a politically active cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, a police operation arrested over 50 police chiefs, prominent politicians’ relatives, and other supporters of the Erdogan administration. Yesterday, according to the New York Times, the […]
The BBC reports that approximately 52 people, including five police chiefs and three sons of cabinet ministers were arrested yesterday for their alleged involvement in a bribery scandal. The operation is believed to be a part a larger political offensive led by Fethullah Gulen, a prominent Turkish Muslim leader currently living in exile in the U.S., and […]
Co-Authored by Azadeh Pourzand and Reza Akhlaghi The Region at A Glance 2012 was the year that the Middle East entered a period of turbo instability. This period accentuated itself in different parts of the region in different forms. Syria’s civil war reached a point of no-return-to-normalcy, ensuring only one outcome for Bashar Al-Assad’s […]
September 6, 2012 by H.A. Unver http://fikraforum.org/?p=2644 On August 20, a car bomb went off in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, killing nine civilians, including four children. The Turkish government blamed the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group on the U.S. Department of State’s foreign terrorist organizations list, for […]
Acting on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s directives for the production of long-range missile with 2500km (1553 miles) range, Turkey’s Defense Industry Executive Committee has formally announced its decision to commence design and production work for an ICBM. According to Turkish NTV and Zaman news agencies, sources in the Ministry of Defense have indicated that industry agencies had […]
After the shooting down of a Turkish F4, supposedly unarmed, last Friday, Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently declared that Turkey considers Syria as a “clear and present danger.” However, he went further and claimed that “we [Turkey] won’t be trapped into a war of provocation, but we won’t be silent and do nothing […]
This end of year has been quite tumultuous in Europe: European citizens are in the street, rating agencies threaten to downgrade the rating of some members of the Eurozone, the race to elections is going full speed in several EU countries, all this taking place in a dire economic and political climax. The political debate […]
Summary of Turkish foreign policy in 2011 2011 was in many ways a milestone in modern Turkish history. First, the Arab Spring not only shook the Western influence in the region, it also ended the post-colonial period in the Middle East, marked by authoritarian-suppressive regimes, which in their way mirrored and reflected their perception of […]
Once the shining example of Turkey’s ‘strategic depth’, the Assad regime, as a result of its repression of Syrian dissent, has moved from a ‘zero-problems’ policy to a ‘tough love’ policy in Turkey’s foreign policy outlook. During his September speech in New York, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan emphasized Turkey’s changing view towards the […]
When eminent scholar Walter Russell Mead tackles a subject he does not do it on the cheap. One of his latest long articles attempts to discern the current trajectory of Turkey’s foreign policy and he takes his readers through quite a ride. Mead, an American history, smoothly goes through modern Turkish history and then ties […]
A recent Ipsos survey has indicated that Turkey is the most critical NATO member of the operations in Libya. According to the survey the most support for military intervention is in Belgium (78%) followed by strong support in France (72%) and Canada (70%), whereas the weakest support among NATO countries registers in Hungary (54%), Italy […]
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