By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, November 2, 2020 As the world becomes increasingly more focused on the second coronavirus wave and the American elections, Erdoğan’s mercenaries and army will most likely invade Northern Syria again in the coming days and weeks.
Erdoğan knows that no regional or global power will seriously challenge him if he occupies the rest of Northern Syria, also known as Rojava. During the last four years, he has seized every opportunity to execute his neo-Ottoman enterprise. He has openly recruited jihadis and occupied three strategic areas in Rojava. As the Syrian Kurds remain the most stubborn obstacle to his regional expansion southward, he has made his intentions to eliminate the semiautonomous administration in Northern Syria abundantly clear.
The Trump administration has little concern for the situation in Syria. Dismissing the Pentagon officials’ strong advice, Trump has given in to Erdoğan’s demands in Northern Syria more than once. Erdoğan secured Trump’s implicit approval to attack the Syrian Kurds about a year ago, during a dubious phone call between the two leaders. Given that things might change under a Biden administration, it is safe to assume that the opportunistic Erdoğan has already planned a devastating strike to knock out this secular, semiautonomous, multiethnic entity in Rojava.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Thursday, December 12, 2019 For decades, Sunni Islamism was led by Saudi Wahabism, while the Muslim Brotherhood developed strategies for taking over governments. When King Salman assumed power in Saudi Arabia in 2015, a major shift took place in Saudi politics. For the first time in the history of the kingdom, Wahabis were confronted in the centers of power. This coincided with the escalation of Turkey’s Islamist ambitions to become the leading Sunni imperial power, led by Erdoğan. The center of Sunni Islamism gradually moved from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, and this was reinforced when the Saudis came out in support of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to reinstall their ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Erdoğan, on the other hand, lost a strategic ally when Morsi was deposed by el-Sisi.
Parallel to this shift of the Sunni centers of gravity, Al-Qaida was losing ground while ISIS emerged as the main force capable of recruiting fundamentalist youth to join jihad. As many of Al-Qaida’s funding sources dried up due to new Saudi policies, Turkey did everything short of openly professing support to empower ISIS. Erdoğan’s regime allowed tens of thousands of jihadis to join ISIS from 2012, when ISIS became a major force in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars, to 2018, when it ultimately fell under the Kurdish attacks supported by the United States.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Despite a decade of resistance since the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, another Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has yet to be born. In its way lie Sunni and Shia Islamist blocs, which have been remarkably successful in preventing entire societies from stepping forward. In countries where they have assumed state power, Islamist forces have been aggressive and totalitarian, while elsewhere they have hijacked popular liberal movements of regime change in recent years. Ultimately, if the anti-Islamist resistance does not soon bring down the main sponsors of the Sunni and Shia blocs—the Turkish and Iranian regimes, respectively—the coming era will be no less bloody than the period from 1919 to 1945.
In my view, the avalanche that will topple the regime in Iran is gaining speed, but as for the Sunni bloc, I am less optimistic. The Kurds are the last obstacle to Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman caliphate, and it seems they are being left to face their heroic yet tragic fate alone. If the Islamist momentum of militarization and mobilization is allowed to continue building, it will eventually shatter the prospects for international peace. Perhaps only then, looking back on these days, will liberal democracies recognize their own culpability for failing to support anti-Islamist struggles in the region.
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By Pekka Sulkunen · Monday, June 29, 2015  The Kurdish Question is a continuation of violence, protest, and repression that persist from the unfinished national state-building of the early twentieth-century Europe. This article compares it with similar but more successful ones in the Nordic countries. The Kurdish Question depends on the democratization of Turkish society. There are black holes on both sides of the conflict that absorb efforts to build democratic institutions. Enlightenment critique of absolutism in Europe established the supremacy of the social over the political order. The republic represents the will of the people. Koselleck argued that this idea potentially drifts towards totalitarianism and brutalities: those who do not obey are excluded to the point of losing their human worth. This is the heart of the Kurdish Question in Turkey today. In democracy different groups defend their interests in political movements that attempt to rule by law. In the Kurdish Question negotiable interests have been identified and reforms are on the way. The problem is that symbolic black holes absorb efforts to negotiate into the requirement of unity and consequent inability to deal with difference. On the Turkish side, the unity is imposed by the secular and modern nationalism itself. On the Kurdish side it consists of a silence about differences in the Kurd society, which is still largely tribal but with a large population outside the clan system.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, March 4, 2011 This post originally appeared at The Brahmsky Report.
The Gaza flotilla incident of 31 May 2010 cost the lives of nine Turkish men and left another flotillan grievously wounded in the head. Several Israeli soldiers were seriously injured as well, in an operation launched by Israel’s IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) to halt the advance of a small fleet of ships toward Gaza. Afterward, relations between Turkey and Israel—longtime allies in a tough neighborhood—were seen to have reached their nadir as a result, when the Prime Minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, denounced Israel’s actions. In the still turbulent wake of this notorious incident, TBR met recently in Istanbul with Huseyin Oruc, President of the Board of Directors of IHH (Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), one of the main organizers of the international sea-borne mission to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and filed this report.
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