Turkish strikes on Syrian government troops and overt Kurdish attacks on targets inside Turkey signal that both sides are changing the rules of the game as Ankara eyes normalization with Damascus.
Ankara’s reconciliation overtures to Damascus have been accompanied by growing Turkish attacks on Syrian Kurdish and government forces along the border — a sign of new engagement rules in a border strip extending 32 kilometers (20 miles) into northern Syria that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to see as a “safe zone.”
In his memoir, Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani shares that Turkey’s former President Turgut Ozal had once floated the idea of “annexing” Iraqi Kurdistan.
As Turkey escalates its campaign against Kurdish militants in the north of Syria and Iraq and Kurdish politicians within its borders, Masoud Barzani, the preeminent leader of Iraq’s Kurds, recalls a time when Ankara’s policy toward his people was distinctly different.
The mullahs appear convinced that once the Biden administration capitulates completely to their demands for reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, they will be able to step up their already significant efforts to eliminate Israel and export their Islamic Revolution to Arab and Islamic countries. Iran already occupies four Arab countries: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.
Gezielt jene zu stützen, die bei den derzeitigen Preissteigerungen selbst nicht mehr stehen können, das ist auch für den Zusammenhalt unserer Gesellschaft entscheidend, kommentiert Ann-Kathrin Büüsker. Im Moment gebe es aber nur ein Flickwerk an Vorschlägen. Es werde Zeit, dass die Ampel das klärt.
Prior to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in early 2011, Damascus consciously sought to pursue a relatively balanced foreign policy toward most of its neighbors. Its challenges with Israel notwithstanding, Syria tried to maintain diversified and even-handed relations with Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world regionally and with Russia, the European Union, and the United States on the global level. However, when the Arab Spring uprisings brought political crisis home to Syria, the government’s sharp domestic crackdown gradually changed these conditions, resulting in Syria’s expulsion from the Arab League and the escalation of tensions with Turkey and the Western world. This threw Syrian foreign policy out of its traditional balance, compelling the country to rely overwhelmingly on support from Iran and Russia. The constricted room for maneuver on the regional and international stage has had numerous and varied consequences for Syria foreign policy over the past 11 years. But some of the most illustrative about-turns caused by the swing toward Russia could be observed in Syria’s relations with neighbors in the post-Soviet space: namely, Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Alors chef de milice, Ejmi al-Atiri a vu sa vie basculer lorsqu’il a arrêté le fils de Mouammar Kadhafi, un jour de novembre 2011. Il livre en exclusivité le récit de cette capture qui a sans doute changé la face de la Libye.
Lancé dans une réforme de la Constitution qui devrait lui permettre de briguer un nouveau mandat mais qui a bien des détracteurs de Bangui à Paris, Faustin-Archange Touadéra veut jouer la carte du soutien populaire. Il s’appuie notamment sur un homme, Blaise Didacien Kossimatchi, héraut mobilisateur et symbole menaçant des dérives de la présidence.
Le bras de fer entre le Mali et la France se poursuit à New York, au siège des Nations unies. Bamako a saisi le Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, affirmant détenir des preuves d’un soutien de Paris aux groupes terroristes maliens.
The recent assassination of Al-Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri is likely to create a number of ramifications. Al-Zawahiri was assassinated by two Hellfire R9-X missiles from an MQ9 Reaper drone, that had flown over or originated in a third country, in the heart of Kabul, which the US evacuated from in August last year. Al-Zawahiri had a US $25 million bounty upon his head and had been the “invisible” leader of Al-Qaeda since 2011.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that he is planning a new military offensive in northern Syria directed against the Kurds.
If one authoritarian leader can defy world opinion, invade the territory of a sovereign state and incur only minor consequences, why not another? This may well have been the reasoning that first led Erdogan to send his armed forces into Kurdish occupied areas of northern Syria in August 2016. His precedent would have been the invasion of Crimea by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin two years earlier.
