Foreign Ministry

Turkey has announced its decision to continue to remove its troops from the Bashiqa camp near Mosul after nearly 10 days of tension with the Iraqi government and upon insistent appeals from Washington, which included a phone call from U.S. President Barack Obama to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.
 

Turkey on Dec. 19 said it would "continue" to pull its troops out of northern Iraq after US President Barack Obama urged President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an to do so in order to de-escalate tensions with Baghdad over the deployment.
 

The voting centers for the conservative main opposition New Democracy (ND) party opened at 7 a.m. on Sunday and will close at 7 p.m. before election results are announced after 11 p.m. The electoral process for the selection of a new leader is as it was on Sunday, November 22, when technical problems postponed the procedure.

Israel and Turkey have reached a preliminary agreement to normalize relations, including the return of ambassadors to both countries, Reuters quoted an Israeli official as saying on Dec 17.

A number of veteran experts and former diplomats have cautioned against Turkey's participation in a 34-state Islamic military alliance that consists solely of Sunni states to fight terrorism, saying that forming of such a Sunni bloc would trigger more sectarian divide in the region.

?zmir's keyboard-happy online youth treat the Russian crisis as a joke, but Izmir's producers of fruit and vegetables, worry that the crisis is far too costly to be a laughing matterThe air is heavy with the smell of milk, vanilla and coffee. The strange marriage of wrought iron dominates the decorations. The coffee-counter sports strange flasks that should belong in a lab.

Turkey's Jewish citizens have lit the menorah during the first public celebration of Hanukkah in the republic's history, which was held in Istanbul's Ortaköy district with the attendance of state officials. 

Iraq appealed to the United Nations Security Council on Dec. 11 to demand an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Turkish troops from northern Iraq, calling Turkey's military incursion a "flagrant violation" of international law. 

In a move to diffuse tension with Baghdad over the deployment of Turkish troops to northern Iraq's Bashiqa camp, Turkey has been working on a formula to bring the training camp under the status of the coalition forces, sources told Hürriyet Daily News.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Konstantinos Koutras responded to journalists’ questions on the latest developments on the European level in the refugee/migration crisis: