#kurds

With atrocities taking place in Iraq and Syria, the international community must stop the oppression against certain groups. Indeed, the lesson of Rwanda has been almost entirely ignored in 2015.

Turkey’s historically troubled relationship with its Kurdish population has become less tense since the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) founder and current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became prime minister in 2003.

Akın Ünver sits down with Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association to discuss Turkey’s current foreign policy challenges and the situation in Kobane.

As a U.S. ally and member of NATO, Turkey has a large, well-trained, and well-funded military with more than a half-million personnel in uniform. It is also the only NATO nation that shares a border with both Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State continues to take and hold significant territory.

Mohsen Milani is the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida, where he is a professor of international relations.

Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. Dr. Cagaptay has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals as well as key American and Turkish media outlets. He writes regularly as a columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and […]

Anniversaries are dangerous days.  There is often a flash of attention, lots of words and supposedly deep thought and meaningful promises. Then the sun goes down, and life goes on as before. The world often notes an anniversary without real thought or determination on how to take the steps needed to make it meaningful. As […]

  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 […]

  At thirty-nine years old, Selahattin Demirtas is the Chairman of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Turkish parliament. He has held this position since January 2010 and was first elected to parliament in 2007 as the MP for the Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakir, after which he joined the now-defunct Democratic Society Party […]

The possible Balkanization of Syria is an increasingly likely prospect – at least for the short-term – and could provide a historic counterpoint in the Middle East to what the West did to carve up the region almost a century ago. With the Ottoman Empire defeated after World War I, the triumphant Allies sought to ensure their […]

  It essentially was an accident. Saddam Hussein had been whipped in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraq’s Kurds and Shia to rise up. They did  —  but Bush was all talk; there was no U.S. military help and they were slaughtered. So as Kurdish refugees clung to the freezing […]

I have recently concluded an e-mail interview with the Southeast European Times on the kidnapped Turkish deputy; Mr. Hüseyin Aygün of the Republican People’s Party – CHP. Here is the full version of the interview: ————— August 14, 2012 What happens to the ones that are being kidnapped by PKK?  PKK doesn’t have a monolithic […]