Monthly Archives: November 2015

Russia’s strong response to Turkey shooting down its Su-24 tactical bomber, perhaps an unintentional incident and not a deliberate act to provoke Moscow, in fact reflects the growing anxiety on the part of Russian policymakers about the perception of the long-term threat posed by Turkey’s political Islamist rulers who have wide regional and global ambitions beyond Syria. Continue reading →

Thanks to the generous patronage and political cover provided by Turkey’s Islamist rulers, the outlawed Great Eastern Islamic Raiders’ Front (İBDA/C or IBDA-C), a militant fundamentalist group sympathetic to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has resumed hitherto interrupted operations in this predominantly Sunni Muslim nation of some 80 million. Continue reading →

With a fractured opposition, a media under immense pressure, a frightened business community and a civil society in retreat because of the witch hunt by the Islamists against anybody who dares to utter “rule of law,” “fundamental rights” and “democratic principles,” Turkey has transformed into an autocratic regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Continue reading →

Turkey’s governing Islamist elites, backed by their neo-nationalist partners, have started to change the republican regime based on parliamentary democracy and the separation of powers into a totalitarian regime that employs outdated apartheid repression tactics against critics and opponents from all walks of life. Continue reading →

Turkey’s Islamist rulers have locked themselves in a vicious cycle in which they can now only rely on repressive measures such as abuse of the criminal justice system and police crackdowns on the right to dissent and the right to freedom of expression, fueling more outrage and resentment towards the government, which in turn finds itself in a desperate attempt to resort to more brute force. Continue reading →

With ideological leanings injected heavily into the foreign policy-making of Turkey in the last few years, the nation’s Islamist rulers have turned what was a very promising dialogue that amounted to a strategic perspective of repositioning policies for better coordination between Turkey and the Gulf States into a pervasive feeling of frustration, resentment and even anger. Continue reading →

After having lost the majority in the legislative branch and by extension the power to dominate the executive arm of the state alone in the June 7 election, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the de facto leader of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), dissolved Parliament and called for a snap election on Nov. 1 in order to slow the momentum of the growing opposition to his authoritarian rule. Continue reading →