Until the ongoing “Arab Spring,” perhaps the most important development of the last couple of years, which has affected the entire Middle East region in one way or another, was the resurgence of Turkey as a major player. Despite being geographically located in the Middle East, Turkey – in the wake of the collapse of […]
Continue readingThe North Anatolian Fault runs laterally from the Karliova Triple Junction in Erzincan, Turkey, westward to the Aegean Sea. Numerous deadly earthquakes have occurred along this fault line, the most recent of which devastated the city of Izmit in 1999, resulting in over 19,000 deaths. However, this is not the only significant fault line in modern Turkey. An invisible but certainly […]
Continue readingThe borders of Europe have always been very vaguely defined. With the Greeks, anything outside of their domain was considered barbaric and uncivilized, with murderous brutes to the North and hedonists to the East. With the expansion of Europe to include all of Christendom, new frontiers were formed, with the Eastern-most part of Europe always […]
Continue readingAs the University of Exeter researchers insist, there are some 30 million Kurds in the world. Since they don’t have an independent state they live in foreign countries[1]. In the Middle East region Kurds, almost entirely, live in four countries; Syria (1.7m), Iraq (4.5m) Iran (5 m) and Turkey where the Kurds are composing 20% […]
Continue readingTurkey and Egypt’s strategic roles are likely to become crucial in the development of future scenarios in the Middle East in the post-Arab Spring world. The relations between these two countries, which at the moment are juggling with the idea of creating an alliance, could actually develop in the other direction, into staunch competition in light […]
Continue readingThe new Great Game and the strategy of players such as Turkey and Russia revolve around the term ‘energy security’. Although this term has turned into a buzzword in policy circles, academia, and hydrocarbon industry conferences, it remains poorly defined. It is poorly defined because in reality there is no universal definition of energy security; […]
Continue readingThe most recent elections in Turkey solidified the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The ruling party mustered one in every two votes cast in the elections (49.8 percent, to be exact). Republican People’s Party (CHP) came in distant second with 26 percent and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) third with 13 percent of the votes. The Pro-Kurdish Bloc managed to get 6 […]
Continue readingCONFERENCE ON DEEP STATE, ERGENEKON, AND TURKEY’S CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM (15 September 2010) — One of the most sensitive aspects to the current exposure by the Turkish government of the Ergenekon terror network in Turkey is the links the group have with similar “Gladio” and “false flag” terrorist networks in other nations, including the United States, Russia, […]
Continue readingOn March 1, 2003, the Turkish parliament voted to refuse the United States military the permission to invade Iraq from the north on Turkish soil. Although this event was both condemned by the United States Government and hailed by much of the Islamic world as an act of clear defiance, in reality the decision itself […]
Continue readingLast December Moscow took Europe by surprise with an announcement that South Stream, a 63 billion cubic metre (bcm) pipeline designed to bring Russian natural gas to southern Europe across the Black Sea would be scrapped and replaced with a pipeline of similar capacity that would cross Turkey and stop at its border with Greece. […]
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