“We’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, letting convicted, known, radicalised jihadi criminals walk about our streets”. — Chris Phillips, former head of the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office, The Guardian, December 1, 2019.
If the current crisis facing Turkey is entirely of Mr Erdogan’s own making, that has not prevented the Turkish president from trying to deflect attention away from his own mishandling of the conflict by seeking to provoke a new migrant crisis in Europe.
Turkey would apparently like to see more progress in the talks to grant it admission as a full member of the European Union…. Erdoğan would most certainly like the West overlook his massive democratic deficit, and to help Turkey secure even more dominance over the Greek islands off its coast, as well as its claims on the gas fields beneath the eastern Mediterranean.
“People have seen their properties destroyed, their sheep and goats have been slaughtered, their homes broken into. A few years back, when there were 5,000 migrants on the island, things seemed bad enough. Now there’s a sense that the situation has really got out of hand.” — Nikos Trakellis, community leader in Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos.
In the last decade of the 20th century, Western Europe threw open its doors to those fleeing the collapse of Yugoslavia. Today, Denmark says integration has failed and is pursuing a worrying experiment in dismantling immigrant ‘ghettos’.
“The problem is when, in the name of a religion, some people want to separate themselves from the Republic and therefore not respect its laws.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, February 18, 2020.
According to a new investigation by Swiss media, a cell of jihadists based in Geneva plotted to bomb cisterns full of oil near the city’s airport in a major terror attack.
The father and brother of a man who fought against Isis in Syria have been charged with terror offences, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.
Amid the heavy losses of the insurgency in the current round of fighting in northwest Syria (Idlib and its environs), one criticism has been made is the supposed absence of the leaders of the insurgent factions.
Serbia has over the weekend received a delivery of Russian-made Pantsir S1 air-defense systems, despite warnings of possible U.S. sanctions against the Balkan state, which is seeking membership to the European Union.