“In Turkey, human rights lawyers are particularly targeted for their work representing human rights defenders, victims of human rights violations, victims of police violence and torture, and many people who simply express dissenting opinions.” — Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, June 9, 2021.
Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”
Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.
The long-awaited Turkish-US strategic mechanism aims to set up regular channels to help the two countries cooperate where they can and prevent outstanding issues from blowing up into crises.
Following months of diplomacy, Turkey and the United States have launched a strategic mechanism to boost cooperation in areas such as economy and defense.
Iran has handed over documents to the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in order to help resolve questions over uranium particles found at old but undeclared nuclear sites in the country.
What’s left of Turkey’s presidential system may be further eroded if Erdogan follows in Hungary’s “illiberal” footsteps.
Diplomacy has been termed “the art of deceit,” but few doubt that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was anything but sincere when he phoned Hungary’s Viktor Orban today to congratulate him on his landslide victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections.
How an Old Map Distorts a New Reality
In early December 2021, the Ethiopian government pulled off a dramatic reversal in its yearlong civil war with rebels from the Tigray region. Armed with a new arsenal of drones and other forms of military support from Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopian forces were able to push back an offensive by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, which itself was supported by Somali fighters, who were in turn backed by Qatar.
A 2017 decision to encircle the Islamic State’s capital at Raqqa inhibited the possibility of civilian escape corridors, a Pentagon-sponsored report found.
A Pentagon-commissioned report concluded that the US military could have done more to prevent harm to civilians during the pivotal battle for the Islamic State’s (IS) capital city at Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
Why Is the US Bankrolling Them?
Now Western security officials believe that Iran and Russia have struck a cooperation deal to work together to evade Western sanctions once a new nuclear deal has been agreed by the Biden administration.
People with short memories might say that this wave of terrorism is just ISIS/Arab-Israeli related, but Hamas is also plenty involved.
Part of the challenge facing security forces in the face of the terrorist attacks over the past eight days has been their source: the perpetrators came from radically different sectors, and do not fit into a conventional box that holds a clear answer on what to do next.
Turkish-made drones have featured prominently in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s invasion, taking out significant Russian targets in the first few weeks of the war. But the conflict, and any possibility of a Russian victory, have cast a shadow over the future of Turkey’s rapidly growing drone industry, which relies on Ukrainian engines.