Washington Institute

'The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey' by Soner Çağaptay (IB Tauris, 240 pages, $25)

As Massoud Barzani, the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, continues to resist mounting international calls to scrap a referendum on Kurdish independence planned for September, a rival Kurdish faction has added its voice, declaring what it calls “democratic autonomy” in the predominantly Yazidi region of Sinjar.

This week marks the first anniversary of the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, which from day one the government declared as a terrorist act orchestrated by the U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen.

Ankara subsequently urged Turkish embassies around the world to hold memorial services and use every occasion to explain the evils of Gülen's terror network to Turkey's allies. 

President Trump is looking anew at American allies and partners. While saying he will preserve these relationships, he wants them to pay their fair share and uphold their side of the relationship. Whether it is South Korea or Saudi Arabia, they are subject to his calls for them to contribute more and defray our costs in deploying forces to defend them.

Turkey’s ruling party is set to replace Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at an extraordinary congress in the coming weeks, Reuters reported on Wednesday, signaling the end of his term as premier and plunging the country into political uncertainty.

U.S. President Barack Obama held talks with Saudi Arabia's King Salman on April 20 as he began a two-day visit hoping to ease tensions with the historic U.S. ally.

Riyadh and its Sunni Arab Gulf allies have bristled at what they see as Washington's tilt toward regional rival Iran after Tehran's landmark nuclear deal with world powers.

Kurdish peshmerga forces need a short-term emergency fund of $300 million a month from the U.S. to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a Kurdish Iraqi official said on Feb. 8.      

It would be great fun and entertainment to write and speak about Turkish showbiz stars? highly documented, high-drama divorce cases these days. All of a sudden, women with six-digit incomes have become ?women-against-domestic-violence? crusaders. But let?s pencil them in for another week. The divorce we are talking about is in Iraq. And it could easily get messy.

Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in an audio message published online on March 7, after three bombs wreaked havoc in northeast Nigeria, killing 58 and wounding scores.
      

Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, does not beat around the bush. “On Syria, Turkey needs to cut and run. Built a wall on its border and turn away,” he said when we talked last month in Istanbul.