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A Nato missile shield project that singles out Iran as a threat will be unacceptable to Turkey, President Abdullah Gul said in an interview broadcast Monday. “Nato is a defence organisation. A defence system is being developed against anyone in the world who has ballistic missiles and does not belong to Nato,” Gul said. “Mentioning one country, Iran… is wrong and will not happen. A particular country will not be targeted…We will definitely not accept that,” he said in an interview with the BBC’s Turkish service, aired on Turkish television. Nato and the United States want to set up a...

The news that Turkey and China had organized a joint military exercise at the huge Konya airbase in Turkey's central Anatolian region last month came as a surprise to many. After all, just a year ago, when clashes between Uighur and Han Chinese broke out in China's Xinjiang province in July 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Chinese authorities of mishandling a situation that he compared to "genocide." What explains such a dramatic improvement in relations between Turkey and China? And how should this military exercise be understood in the context of the current shifts taking place in...

Turkey's Islamist-rooted government faces making a difficult decision that pits maintaining good relations with its neighbours against joining a NATO missile shield directed against Iran. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought in recent years to boost Turkey's ties in the region -- raising suspicions he is moving the country out of the West's orbit -- and will now have to make a decision that will be viewed as a test of its commitment to its NATO partners. The US plan to build a network of ballistic missile interceptors in Europe has been taken up by NATO, partly in order...

The air forces of China and Turkey have carried out a joint exercise, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday, in what appeared to be the first such drill involving Beijing and a NATO member country. Turkey assured the United States it would take the "utmost care" to protect sensitive U.S. and NATO technologies, said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Tamara Parker, a department spokeswoman. She described Turkey's government as committed to the NATO alliance and the continuation of strong ties to the United States. "To the best of our knowledge, U.S.-made F-16s were not involved in the exercise," Parker said....

Russia is ready to participate in a tender to offer Turkey S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, the state-controlled arms exporter said on Wednesday. "The Turkish military has a great need for S-300 and S-400 long-range missile defense systems," Rosoboronexport CEO Anatoly Isaikin said. "Russia has expressed its readiness to participate in a tender for the delivery of such systems." He said leading SAM manufacturers from Western countries would participate in the tender "on a par with Russia." He gave no indication as to what specific SAM modifications would be offered or the timeframe for the tender. Turkish military experts...

Turkey’s decision to veto the latest U.N. Security Council resolution on Iran should be of concern for all those, like me, who desire a peaceful resolution of the international crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. The Turks are apparently upset that the West has not responded positively to the nuclear deal it recently negotiated with Iran, with Brazil’s assistance, whereby Tehran would ship some of its stockpile of enriched uranium to Ankara in return for fuel rods for its so-called research reactor in Tehran. In fact this deal was nothing more than a watered-down version of the agreement Iran negotiated with...

Erdogan's bellicose support for the flotilla has sacrificed Israeli relations in the service of retrograde east-facing aspirations........ Support for Turkey is at an all-time high in the Arab world. The last time Turkish flags were carried through the streets of Middle Eastern capitals was during the first world war, as people took to the streets in continued support for the Ottoman sultan-caliph against the western entente powers. The sultan-caliph had proclaimed a jihad. Thanks to Turkish government support of a blockade-running mission led by a group of Hamas sympathisers, they are flying once again. No ruling Arab leader is as...

WASHINGTON—Turkey moved closer to severing its relations with Israel, demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly apologize for his government's high-seas military action against a pro-Palestinian flotilla this week in order to avert a formal diplomatic rupture. Senior Israeli officials responded Friday that their government would never apologize for an act of "self defense" and acknowledged that Israel could be on the verge of losing its closest military and economic ally in the Middle East. Such a development, these officials said, would raise new strategic and diplomatic challenges for Israel if Ankara reorients itself away from its historically pro-Israel and...

Turkey was examining the prospect of acquiring naval submarines rejected by neighboring Greece. Turkish sources said Ankara could acquire up to six Type 214 submarines from Germany. They said the Turkish Navy could receive the underwater vessels for one-third less than their original price. "This has become a major issue in Turkish relations with Germany," a source said. In 2009, Germany's ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, citing a 524 million euro debt by Athens, canceled a multi-billion-euro submarine project with the Hellenic Navy. The navy had refused to pay for the first Type 214 submarine, complaining that the platform was defective. The...

•The rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus is only the culmination of the increasingly problematic policies pursued by the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). •Two factors in particular seem to have led to Turkey's shift away from Israel and toward Syria. First, Turkey no longer needed Israeli assistance to pressure the Syrian government to change its policy of providing safe-haven to the terrorist Kurdish Worker's Organization (PKK). Second, in the past seven years, once secular Turkish politics have undergone a profound Islamist transformation. •At the same time, the dynamic between the Turkish military and the state's civilian leadership has changed....

SNIPPET: "ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkish police launched a nationwide crackdown on suspected militants linked to the al-Qaida terror network on Friday..." SNIPPET: "Those detained Friday's raids include a faculty member of the Yuzunci Yil University in the eastern city of Van, who is suspected of recruiting students at the campus and other people through the Internet and of sending them to Afghanistan for training, Anatolia reported, citing unnamed police officials. The suspect was identified by his initials M.E.Y. only. Anatolia said other suspects included some local leaders, university students, and people believed to be spreading al-Qaida propaganda."

'There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's government - for six decades the West's closest Muslim ally - since Erdogan's AK party came to power in 2002. Three events this past month reveal the extent of that change. The first came on October 11 with the news that the Turkish military - a long-time bastion of secularism and advocate...

Blog: Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Blog Details Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria to Link Their Power Networks Iran, Iraq, and Turkey yesterday signed an agreement for power and energy cooperation and for linking their power networks with that of Syria. The memorandum of understanding was signed by Iran's Minister of Energy Parviz Fattah and his Iraqi and Turkish counterparts at the end of the first regional power conference, held in Baghdad. Under the agreement, power networks of the Persian Gulf Arab states, Central Asian republics and regional countries will in the long run be connected to those...

"Summary of Overnight Events, 03 January 2009"

A Turkish court ruled today the closure of the only gay rights association in Turkey after the prosecutor had said it violated the family protection and public morality laws... Unlike the other Muslim states, homosexuality has never been a crime in Turkey, but is surrounded by a widespread social criticism .

Police Dogs Find Bomb-Packed Bus in Turkish Garage September 11, 2007 ANKARA, Turkey — Sniffer dogs discovered a bomb-laden vehicle parked in an Ankara garage, as police have increased security measures in Turkey fearing attacks timed to Sept. 11, the governor of Ankara said. Gov. Kemal Onal said a large amount of explosives were found stashed in a minibus, which had a fake license plate. "A possible disaster has been prevented," Onal told reporters at the site. Explosive experts defused the bomb, Police Chief Ercument Yilmaz said, adding that the type of the explosives would be announced later. Police had...

A powerful explosion rocked a busy commercial neighborhood in the Turkish capital Tuesday, and at least 20 people, including foreigners, were injured, CNN-Turk television reported. Television video showed medics tending to the injured and carrying people into ambulances on stretchers. The cause of the blast, outside one of the oldest shopping malls of Ankara and near bus stops, was not immediately known.

President and Mrs. Bush attended the National Prayer Breakfast in DC this morning. President Bush took his "Social Security can be fixed" message directly to Americans. The Senate voted 60-36 to confirm Judge Alberto Gonzales as United States Attorney General, with all of the "no" votes coming from Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independent Jim Jeffords of Vermont. Any other descriptions of what the president or his chief advisors did today will appear next to the photos. Enjoy today's visit to Sanity Island!

Throughout the 1990s, Turkish foreign policy analysts had an easy job. After all, Turkish foreign policy was predictable. Ankara cooperated enthusiastically with Washington, whether in the Middle East or in the Balkans. Turkey aligned itself with Israel and kept at arms length from Middle Eastern neighbors such as Syria and Iran. In Europe, Ankara traded heavily with the European Union (EU) but did not allow the EU to dictate foreign policy. The European Union's frequent allegations and criticism of human rights abuses in Turkey, especially with regard to Turkey's fight against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan) terrorists, soured...

"Turkey's European Union accession process has ceased to be an ambiguous process for the EU and has taken an irreversible direction," says Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey. The "post-Islamist" leader of his anything-but-post-Islamic country has ample reason to feel cocky: Some European leaders treat Turkey's EU membership as a fait accompli that should be supported if it cannot be resisted. Others are far more enthusiastic, and claim that Turkey's membership would be a blessing for the Old Continent. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, thus declared earlier this month that Turkey had fulfilled the required democracy...