Persecution of Christians

Greek Cyprus has made it a crime to deny the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenian Turks a century ago, a move likely to rile its old rival Turkey as peace talks on the ethnically-split island remain stalled.

?The Stanford Global Studies Division, in conjunction with the Handa Center for Human Rights, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, has agreed to sponsor three Stanford University students to participate in the Armenian Genocide centennial commemoration in Istanbul, Project 2015 said today,?

Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized control of most of the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.
      

A U.S.-led programme to train Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants will start in May, Turkey's Defence Minister ?smet Y?lmaz was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency on March 31.
   

Could there be that much of a difference between how developments of this "Greater Middle Eastern Area" are perceived in Ankara, Cairo or Kuwait? Listening in a Kuwait hotel room to a political analyst on a Saudi news channel reporting live on the Cairo meeting of the Arab League, the difference of perception was crystal clear.

Arab leaders have agreed to form a joint military force, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced on March 29 on the second day of a summit.
 
"The Arab leaders had decided to agree on the principle of a joint Arab military force," Sisi said in a speech at the summit held in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Elections were postponed from mid-February to allow the army to recapture territory from the Islamist militants of Boko Haram.

The two main candidates had pledged to prevent violence during and in the aftermath of the elections.

However, several hours after voting started, violent incidents at polling stations took place with many dead.

Along with the unrest in Syria and Libya, there are two other big ongoing regional armed conflicts in the Middle East.

?Eat a big mouthful, but don?t make big promises,? a Turkish saying goes. Our ancestors were right, weren?t they?

What were we saying yesterday about Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? We were saying he was ?a dictator, coup stager and murderer.? We said we would not sit at his table.

In an interview with France 24 on March 26, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an said Turkey supports the Saudi-led mission to rout Shiite rebels in Yemen and said ground troops will be needed to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq.