My new piece in The National Interest is an analysis of Turkish current events, seen from a slightly more anthropological angle than usual. I identify repeating themes and patterns that underlie Turkish society and politics.
The December 2014 edition of Current History has a collection of articles on the Middle East by prominent scholars that give excellent analyses and updates for different countries in the region. Here’s my take on Turkey.
It appears certain that Turkey has provided military and medical assistance to ISIS (now Islamic State or IS) fighters in the past couple of years, allowing them refuge in and easy transit through Turkey to Syria. The Turkish IHH organization played a prominent role in this.
The biggest danger to the region — including Turkey — and arguably the world at the moment is not Russia’s expansionism or the Israel-Gaza conflagration, but Islamic State (IS), formerly ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
Turkish Hizbullah is back — in a new guise as a political party, Huda-Par. Hizbullah (not related to Lebanon’s Hezbullah) has been around for a few decades, wreaking havoc of one kind or another.
A historic meeting and rally yesterday in Diyarbakir brought together PM Erdogan and the leader of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (aka Kurdistan), Masoud Barzani, amid a boisterous show of unity between Turkish Kurds and the Turkish government.
The looming question is should there be a military response to the recent gas attacks that killed over a thousand civilians in Syria.
TEL AVIV GRAFFITI
Now that I’m tweeting, Facebooking, and in general traveling about like a dervish, I want to make sure I don’t neglect my blog! There are a number of interesting things happening, which I’ll pontificate about shortly, but for now, let me just announce, for anyone interested, that on Wednesday I testified before the US Senate […]