Orientul Mijlociu

Selahattin Demirtas’ announcement comes amid heated public debate over whether Kemal Kilicdaroglu would resign after he was defeated by President Erdogan in Sunday’s runoff.

The ongoing public debate in Turkey over whether the country’s main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu would resign the Republican People’s Party leadership after his presidential election loss took a surprising twist on Wednesday with the announcement of a departure from another opposition figure.

The key question following the vote is whether the alliance between the HDP and the main opposition Republican People’s Party and its Table of Six partners can endure.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s electoral victory is roiling the country’s Kurdish movement, with its most popular leader declaring from jail that he is withdrawing from active politics. The announcement Wednesday by Selahattin Demirtas, former co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), presages debate on a future course to be charted ahead of critical local elections that are to be held in March 2024. Kurdish voters are poised to play a key role as they did in 2019 when they helped the opposition wrest key cities, notably Ankara and Istanbul, from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The leader of an insurgent group that rules much of northwest Syria rose to notoriety over the past decade by claiming deadly bombings, threatening revenge against Western “crusader” forces and dispatching Islamist religious police to crack down on women deemed to be immodestly dressed.

There will be a second round for the presidential vote on May 28, but an opposition victory seems unlikely.

Turkey is a country where average schooling is 6.5 years. In other words, the average person is a 7th grade drop-out. Ninety-five percent of Turkish citizens have never travelled abroad.

A senior Iraqi military delegation, consisting of top commanders from Joint Operations Command arrived in the Kurdistan Region’s Sulaimani on Tuesday.

Top commanders from the Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga forces and the military on Tuesday agreed to increase the joint operations against the remnants of ISIS in the disputed areas with the support of the Iraqi air force.

An airstrike targeted a militant group in northern Iraq’s Yazidi heartland of Sinjar on Tuesday, according to local officials, who attributed the strike to Turkey.

Officials gave conflicting reports regarding the number of casualties. The semi-autonomous Kurdish region’s counter-terrorism service said in a statement that three fighters were killed in the attack, and one wounded. Ali Hamed, a member of the militia-affiliated town council, however, denied that there were any deaths, saying one civilian was lightly injured in the attack.

The regional interests behind Syria’s return to the Arab League have nothing to do with democracy, participation, or respect for human rights.

Syria has a rich history stretching back to the earliest civilizations, with a legacy found not only in the traces left by empires, but also in the country’s accumulated cultural heritage. Syrians continue to produce literature, art, poetry, and philosophy at the highest level.

Nuclear armed, serial war criminal and international law-violating Apartheid Israel is a genocidally racist settler-colonialist obscenity, and ranks on a per capita basis among the world’s top militarized countries in 30 key areas of military capacity and ghastly application of military power. On a per capita basis it ranks number 1 in terms of military expenditure, tanks, warplanes, US military aid, killing journalists, population expulsions, and genocide.

A return to a parliamentary democracy system—the opposition’s most important electoral promise—is highly unlikely if Erdogan remains in power. This would be bad news for Turkey’s Western allies.

After a dynamic and unfair campaign, the interim results of Turkey’s dual election send the two main presidential contenders to a second round and give a safe majority to the incumbent parliamentary alliance.