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.
Airstrikes and artillery fire intensified sharply across Sudan’s capital early on Tuesday, residents said, as the army sought to defend key bases from paramilitary rivals it has been fighting for more than a month.
The airstrikes, explosions and clashes could be heard in the south of Khartoum, and there was heavy shelling across the River Nile in parts of the adjoining cities of Bahri and Omdurman, witnesses said.
Devenus imbattables en matière de falsification, les experts du mainstream occidental préfèrent passer sous silence les réalités ou les chiffres qui les dérangent plutôt que de mettre en évidence les 27 millions de morts de la Russie soviétique face aux 290 000 morts décomptés par l’armée américaine (sur les 12 millions de GI’s engagés sur le front occidental). Ni vu, ni entendu, ni lu…
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.
Events in Sudan would have perhaps gone unnoticed in Russian society, including by politicians and the media, if Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had not visited Khartoum two months before fighting broke out last week between Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.
Imagine yourself as a civilian in eastern Ukraine in autumn 2022. Only a few months ago, an apartment building in your neighborhood was obliterated by a HIMARS rocket, which sent a wave of concrete dust careening in every direction. You and your family moved your belongings to a friend’s cellar, a humid, drafty, and claustrophobic space but somewhat safer from the rockets screaming daily overhead. The air outside is murky with a perpetual haze of smoke that infiltrates the lungs.
The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little forest. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Where America Must Counter Russia’s Mercenaries
Russia’s infamous Wagner paramilitary company may be headed for defeat in Ukraine. The group has sustained enormous losses in the last five months, and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is embroiled in a high-stakes feud with Russia’s top military brass, who have accused him of indirectly aiding Ukraine by “sowing rifts” among Russian forces. Late last week, Prigozhin publicly castigated Russia’s senior military leadership for not supplying Wagner with enough ammunition and threatened to withdraw his forces from the city of Bakhmut. According to the British Ministry of Defense, the Kremlin may be looking to replace the Wagner contingent in Ukraine with forces from another private military company—one that it can more tightly control.
On Thursday, The Soufan Center hosted a virtual discussion on the security, political, and human rights dimensions of the current situation in Afghanistan. Moderated by TSC’s Colin P. Clarke, the conversation featured Arian Sharifi, Amira Jadoon, and Ioannis Koskinas, with an introduction by our Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink.