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.
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.
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.
London-based Iran International says Javad Ghafari, who previously commanded Iranian troops in Syria, was appointed to orchestrate assassinations of Israelis in Istanbul
A London-based Iranian opposition news outlet on Friday published the name and details of an Iranian commander who it said was in charge of plans to kill Israelis in Turkey in recent months.
As a young boy, El Shafee Elsheikh dreamed of playing football for Queens Park Rangers.
Refugees from the civil war in Sudan, he and his family had settled near QPR’s west London ground when he was five.
Footballers were soon replaced by gangsters as role models when he was drawn into a world of drugs and violence on the council estates where he grew up.
Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has said the agreement to ship Ukrainian foodstuffs could be a stepping stone toward peace.
Flushed with the success of the Ukrainian grain shipment deal it helped negotiate, Turkey is hoping to eventually translate its position as a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow into a peace agreement.
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.”
În ultimii ani și mai cu seamă în ultimele luni, rolul Ankarei în panorama geopolitică internațională a crescut considerabil iar o comparație cu importanța Turciei pe eșichierul politico-militar euro-asiatic la început de secol XV nu ar fi chiar hazardată.
When the regime’s television host asked him about the video showing concrete being poured into the Arak reactor’s pipes to block them, Ali Akbar Salehi, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran responded: “[N]ot the pipes you see here. We had purchased similar pipes, but I couldn’t announce it at that time…. We needed to be smart.” — Iran Focus, August 2, 2022.
