Kurds

"Be Serok jiyan nabe!" The well-worn Kurdish adage means "no life without our leader." It was crafted for Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which initially fought for independence then Kurdish self-rule inside Turkey, since 1984. The mantra has gained a new urgency after the botched July 15 coup. The rogue officers who were seeking to overthrow and kill Turkish

A terrorist for the Israelis, Khaled was a symbol throughout the world for the Palestinian armed struggle, following her participation in one of the four simultaneous hijackings of September 1970, inspiring songs, films and works of art internationally. These hijackings were part of the Palestinian “response” to the ignominious defeat they suffered with the

Speaking in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, which has been repeatedly targeted by PKK terrorist attacks, Yıldırım said it is estimated that some 14,000 teachers serving in the region are somehow associated with terrorism.

Sadly, it’s a classic Middle East moment, when regional players’ mistrust of each other overwhelms their common interest in fighting the terrorist Islamic State. And, equally sadly, it’s a moment that illustrates the frailty of the United States’ Syrian policy, which has built its military plans on the treacherous fault line of Turkish-Kurdish enmity.

Since Turkey launched its invasion of Syria on August 24, mobilizing Syrian Sunni militia funded, armed and trained by the CIA, it has increasingly directed its firepower not against ISIS, but rather against the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Pentagon-backed formation dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

While the White House was preparing to consider a secret plan to have American special forces join the Turks, Ankara pulled the trigger on the mission unilaterally without giving officials in Washington advance warning. When clashes started between Turkish and Syrian Kurdish fighters—who are directly backed by U.S. Special Forces—the Pentagon issued

Turkish forces intervened in Northern Syria, officially “against terrorists” (it is a custom now for nearly everybody operating in Syria, to do it under pretext of combating terrorism). But for most observers, the real aim of the operation is to stop the advance of Kurdish forces to the west of the river Euphrates.

Henry Kissinger reminds us that in international relations, states do not have permanent friends or enemies, only interests. That lesson reverberated Tuesday in St. Petersburg, where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan let bygones be bygones with his "dear friend, the esteemed Vladimir" in an ironic (and somewhat excessive) display of diplomatic reconciliation.

German parliamentarians prepare to ask also for sanctions against USA, Britain and France. According to those parliamentarians, by implementing the Chaos Strategy in the Middle East, in order to “promote democracy”, as they kept saying, Washington, London and Paris are directly responsible for the refugee crisis, the terror attacks and the whole instability which landed now in Turkey.

The Kurds have been the most oppressed people of the region for the past 100 years. Although they have a strong, ancient and well-established presence in the region, they nonetheless fell victim to the nationalist conflicts of the empires that ruled and governed them, as well as to the interests of colonial powers in the region.