Orientul Mijlociu

Ankara demands “concrete steps” from Sweden and Finland before giving the nod to NATO’s Nordic enlargement, including an “asset freeze,” a demand that hasn’t been expressed publicly before.

Turkey will wait for more concrete steps — including a freeze of “terror assets” in Sweden and Finland — before giving a nod to the Nordic enlargement of NATO, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Wednesday while speaking on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Bucharest.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has signaled his intent to soon launch the ground phase of Operation Claw-Sword, a military operation designed to clear areas along Turkey’s southern borders of fighters from affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, which the United States lists as a terrorist organization.

The Turkish ministry of defense claims to have killed 471 Kurdish militants in 271 separate attacks in Syria and Iraq since the start of the operation

The Turkish Minister of Defense, Hulusi Akar, visited the Turkish troops on the border with Iraq on 27 November to inspect the ongoing operations as part of the country’s military effort against Kurdish militants in Iraq and Syria.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on 26 November that large reinforcements of US military troops and equipment made their way into northern and eastern Syria, coming in from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) through the illegal Al-Waleed border crossing.

Colonel Davoud Jafari, a senior official of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division, was assassinated in Syria on 22 November. The IRGC claimed that Israel was responsible for the attack.

On 24 November, the Iraqi government announced its decision to redeploy troops to the borders with Iran and Turkey, following recent attacks by Tehran and Ankara against Kurdish positions in the Iraqi Kurdistan semi-autonomous region, Al-Awsat news reported.

On 19 August, 2014, ISIS released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley who was kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria.

Foley’s shocking execution became one of the most widely followed news stories of the Syrian war. Foley’s killer, Mohammed Emwazi, popularly known as “Jihadi John” by the western media, was a Kuwaiti-born Brit from West London. In the Foley execution video, Emwazi’s unmistakable London accent can be heard.

A Turkish drone strike on a top Kurdish commander’s headquarters came within 130 meters of US troops in Syria on Tuesday.

The Pentagon warned on Wednesday that Turkey’s airstrikes against Kurdish forces in northeast Syria endanger US troops and threaten to undermine years of progress in the war against the Islamic State.

The Turkish president adds that “there is no resentment or bitterness in politics.”

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has aired fresh interest in a possible meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as Ankara is doubling down on its threat for a ground operation against Syrian Kurdish groups. 

The police of the Syrian National Army assaulted protesters near the city of al-Bab following civil protests calling for controlling the security situation in the city and holding the killers of a prominent activist accountable.

The Turkish Ministry of Defense said on its official Twitter page, “It’s payback time,” in reference to last week’s attack in Istanbul that Turkey blamed on Syrian Kurdish forces, threatening more escalation.