Fikret Bila

Fikret Bila has handed over the post of daily Hürriyet editor-in-chief to Vahap Munyar, a columnist and former head of the newspaper's economy desk.

Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), has sought to adapt the group's ideology in order to secure foreign support, according to journalist Fikret Bila, the editor-in-chief of daily Hürriyet. 

'The Ideological Codes of the PKK: A Blueprint' by Fikret Bila, translated by Gülşah Dikmeci (Doğan Kitap, 223 pages, 25TL)

News items reported from the Turkish capital Ankara over the last few weeks are not quite consistent with the political predictability that one may have expected from a single-party government led by a president who recently won a referendum gathering all executive power.

"The Ideological Codes of the PKK," the latest book by Turkish journalist Fikret Bilâ, which offers an in depth look into how the Syrian wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has managed to attract young recruits from the western world, has been published by Doğan Kitap in the English language.

The first anniversary of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt is over but there are still unanswered questions about it, which makes it more difficult to understand what actually happened that night and how the Gülenists, who are accused of plotting the coup, managed to stage it.

There is just one good piece of news regarding Turkish foreign policy nowadays, but there are many bad ones that have stained the outlook on Turkey when evaluated from abroad.

Experienced journalist and columnist Fikret Bila has taken the helm as the editor-in-chief of Hürriyet, the largest daily newspaper in the country, from Sedat Ergin, who said he would return to writing columns because he was tired. 

It was around 2014, at one of the last receptions of Abdullah Gül toward the end of his presidential term at the Çankaya Palace in Ankara, when it was still Turkey's presidential palace. A group of reporters had surrounded a minister or top bureaucrat to take their chances to find a bit of information.

Turkey's cross-border operation inside Syria to clear the area from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has entered its second week, and one wonders whether the Free Syrian Army (FSA) may even walk all the way to Damascus in front of the Turkish army. After all, it has faced very little resistance on the way to capturing the Azaz-Jarablus corridor.