There is speculation about a secret deal between Ankara and Baghdad eyeing a contiguous, 30-kilometer-deep buffer from Syria to Iraq.
Turkey’s fresh military operation against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, under way since April 18, has sparked debates in the Iraqi parliament over claims of a secret deal between the two countries, allowing Turkish troops to advance 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) inside Iraq.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told university students that there is a new multipolar world order emerging.
During a speech to Iranian university students Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke about a number of global developments.
In the afternoon of April 26, 2022, a burqa-clad woman blew herself up near a van close to the Confucius Institute, a Chinese language teaching center at Karachi University. According to Karachi counterterrorism police, four people, including three Chinese nationals and their Pakistani driver, were killed and four others, including two Chinese nationals, were injured in the attack. Among the dead were the director of the Confucius Institute Huang, teachers Guiping, Ding Mupeng, Chen Sai, and their Pakistani driver Khalid.[1]
On April 22, 2022, Hammam ‘Isa Al-Sheikh, a self-described “activist” based in Idlib, Syria and a supporter of the Syrian jihadi group Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the most powerful in the Idlib area, posted an image on his Telegram channel showing a page from the sixth-grade English textbook used in the Dar Al-Wahy Al-Sharif (Home of the Noble Revelation) school system, which is affiliated with HTS. The textbook page, from a unit called “Muslim Heroes,” depicts Saudi-born Samer Al-Suwaylem aka Khattab Al-Shishani (the Chechen), who was a prominent commander in the Chechen jihad against Russia in the 1990s and 2000s, hailing him as “the greatest jihadist heroes [sic] in the modern era, the man who conquered the Russians at the height of their power, and through him God raised the banner of glory in Dagestan and Chechnya, [and] Afghanistan.”
Turkish military aircraft violated Greek airspace 90 times in one day, on April 15, and conducted three overflights of inhabited Greek islands, according to Greek media.
Turkish aircraft have, in fact, been violating Greek airspace almost non-stop since the beginning of the year. In fact, Turkey — both its government and political opposition — has for years openly been threatening to capture Greek islands in the Aegean Sea…. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to offer a convenient precedent for Turkey to increase its military aggression against Greece.
But the group is hoping for a resurgence while the West is distracted in Ukraine.
The jihadi Islamic State group recently called on its supporters to resume attacks in Europe while the West is focused on Russia’s Ukraine invasion. In a speech posted online last week, Islamic State spokesman Abu Omar al-Muhajir asked supporters to take advantage of the “crusaders fighting each other” by launching a global offensive to take revenge for a former Islamic State chief killed during a raid by U.S. special forces in northwest Syria earlier this year. He also asked sympathizers in Israel to “arm themselves” against the Israeli state and claimed that only the return of an Islamic caliphate could liberate Palestinians.
The events of recent years have made it increasingly clear that the assault on human rights and democracy in the West and the Middle East are not merely parallel phenomena—they are directly connected. As both regions experience an intense surge of authoritarianism as well as the resulting popular resistance to it, it’s imperative for sound analysis and policymaking to identify the dynamics linking today’s crises across national borders and geographic regions.
The government of Rwanda announced earlier this month what it described as a “migration and economic development partnership” with the United Kingdom, in which the U.K. claims it would send migrants who had reached British territory to Rwanda for processing of their asylum claims for possible settlement in the U.K.
In the fall of 2012, as Syria plunged into civil war and the Eurozone crisis generated panic across global markets, a parliamentary election in Ukraine signaled trouble ahead to those who were paying attention. The results that trickled out on Oct. 28, 2012, indicated that then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions had secured a strong position through dubious constitutional maneuvers and ballot manipulation.
From Ukraine to Syria, Drones Are Reshaping Erdogan’s Foreign Policy
On April 14, Ukrainian forces stunned the world when they sank the Moskva, the heavily armed cruiser that was the flagship of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet. As widely noted in the international press, the Ukrainians succeeded in hitting the ship with their homegrown Neptune missiles, despite the ship’s significant defenses. What has been somewhat less noted, however, were the foreign-made drones that enabled this remarkable attack: according to Ukrainian officials, the strike was coordinated by a pair of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 unmanned drones, which were able to evade the ship’s radar and which provided precise targeting information for the missiles.