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Thousands of jubilant Kurds flooded the streets of Diyarbakir, south east Turkey,on Sunday, setting off fireworks and waving flags as the pro-Kurdish opposition looked likely to enter parliament as a party for the first time. The PeoplesÂ’ Democratic party (HDP) said initial results from SundayÂ’s election showed it would take 80 of 550 seats, a stunning result for a party that pollsters had said would struggle to cross the required 10% threshold. It also marks a major setback for President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, who had hoped for a crushing victory for the AK party he founded, allowing it to change...

Earlier this week a news report unwittingly demonstrated how Turkey—once deemed the most “secularized” Muslim nation—is returning to its Islamic heritage, complete with animosity for the infidel West and dreams of the glory days of jihadi conquests.

Turks went to the polls today in parliamentary elections, and the era of single-party Islamist rule appears to be over. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been counting on the continued rule of his AKP party to change the country’s constitution after these elections, consolidating his already increasingly authoritarian rule into something even more dastardly. But a 2/3 majority of AKP in parliament is needed to change the constitution. Today, the Islamist party walked away with only 41 percent of seats. That’s an eight percent drop from 2011. In a country where the Islamists have garnered the animosity of all manner...

ISTANBUL — Turkish voters delivered a rebuke on Sunday to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his party lost its majority in Parliament in a historic election that dealt a blow to his ambition to rewrite Turkey’s Constitution and increase his power. The election results represented a significant setback to Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist who has steadily increased his power as president, a partly but not solely ceremonial post. After more than a decade as prime minister, Mr. Erdogan has pushed for more control of the judiciary and cracked down on any form of criticism, including prosecutions of those who insult...

The mould-breaking outcome of TurkeyÂ’s general election on Sunday will be viewed as a personal rebuff for the president, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, and as a historic political breakthrough for the countryÂ’s 18 million-strong Kurdish minority, which will be represented by a political party in parliament for the first time.

More than 53.7 million Turkish voters head to the polls on June 7 for a crucial parliamentary election. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has framed the June 7 election in Turkey as a key hurdle on the path to the powerful presidential system that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants to introduce. With about 99 percent of the vote counted and despite being well ahead of other parties with the support of around 42 percent of the populace, the AKP seemed set to received fewer than 276 seats – the bare minimum to keep its parliamentary majority. The Kurdish...

As a member of Congress, Dick Gephardt often spoke passionately about the need for the United States to recognize as genocide the mass deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians under the Turkish government that began one century ago. But as a lobbyist for Turkey since leaving Congress in 2005, Gephardt, a Democrat, has taken the opposite side. His behind-the-scenes work has been cited as a factor in the annual failure of Congress to recognize the Armenian genocide. Justice Department records show that Gephardt’s lobbying firm has been paid more than $8 million since 2008 to fight the declaration...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suffered a serious setback in the parliamentary elections Sunday, according to initial reports. Four hours after the ballots closed, it appeared that Erdogan's AKP party will not have the required majority for passing reforms in the Turkish constitution. With 90% of the votes counted, the Kurdish HDP party received about 11% of the votes, according to Turkish-language CNN. This places it past the 10% threshold required for entering parliament and would give it about 80 MPs. The party has never before passed the threshold. According to reports, AKP received 42 or 43% of the...

AMMAN (Reuters) - Sunni Islamist groups have overrun Syrian army outposts and villages in the Idlib province, closing on coastal strongholds of President Bashar al Assad's government, rebels and a monitor said on Saturday. The Syrian army said its troops had abandoned the town of Muhambal in the western part of Idlib and were regrouping for a counter-offensive. Social media videos showed army trucks and large caches of weaponry abandoned. The Islamist alliance, including al Qaeda's Nusra Front, calls its operation the "Army of Fatah", a reference to conquests that spread Islam across the Middle East from the seventh century....

Turkey’s President has defended the controversial construction of a grandiose new presidential palace, saying his old office was infested with cockroaches. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been accused of squandering state resources when he was Prime Minister by building the 1,150-room palace, which critics say was illegally built on protected land. In the run-up to Sunday’s parliamentary elections, opposition parties have criticised the expenditure.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday stepped up his attacks on foreign media a day ahead of legislative elections, telling the Guardian to “know your limits” and lamenting that “Jewish capital” was behind the New York Times. Erdogan has during the campaign leading up to Sunday’s polls repeatedly criticised foreign media, amid growing concerns over an erosion of freedom of expression in Turkey under his rule. In one of its final pre-election rallies in the eastern province of Ardahan, Erdogan took offence at an article in the Guardian critical of his rule, including an editorial titled “Growing autocracy threatens...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Brothers Molham and Mohammad Kayali spray-painted anti-government graffiti around Aleppo University in northern Syria in early 2012 and held up flags in protest against President Bashar al Assad's government. Worried that their lives were in danger, they gave up on school and fled to Turkey in September 2012. They were reunited last year with their younger brother, Ebrahim, at Emporia State University, a small school in Kansas, joining among about 700 "academic refugees" now in the U.S. who either fled from the long-running violent conflict, attended universities that have closed or couldn't safely travel to...

Did you know that 25 percent of all egg production in the United States has already been taken offline due to the bird flu crisis? You aren’t hearing much about this in the mainstream media, but at this point bird flu has claimed the lives of 45 million chickens and turkeys in America. When I wrote about this a month ago, the number of dead birds was sitting at about 20 million. In just 30 days, the death toll has risen by an astounding 20 million. This is a major crisis and it is already causing egg shortages around the...

Sunday’s Turkish elections are not so much about which party will win as they are about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dream to expand his authoritarian powers. In order to do that, his conservative party needs to win an absolute majority.The June 7 ballot will be a key test for Erdogan. For the first time since 2002, opinion polls suggest that the president’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) may not get enough backing to form a single-party government. A coalition would likely spoil Erdogan’s ambitious plan to rewrite the constitution and transform Turkey into a presidential, rather than a parliamentary,...

Nearly everyone but the Obama administration has heard of the genocide of TurkeyÂ’s Armenian minority in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were deliberately murdered by the Turkish government. While the Armenians were targeted for their ethnicity, what is widely overlooked is the fact that the Armenians were Orthodox Christians who inconveniently enjoyed conspicuous success in an Islamic nation. Now that the Turks have essentially finished off the Armenians, they have been hard at work eliminating the remaining Christians. On the eve of World War I, over 20% of Turkey was Christian. Now it is less than 2%. This...

A look at the Arab press in recent days gives the impression that the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria is on the verge of elimination. But before we pop open the champagne, it’s worth recalling that Assad’s rule has been in the same situation in the past. The old Syria has been slowly falling apart for four years and two months, and as far back as July 2012, following the bombing of the Syrian army’s headquarters in Damascus, commentators (including this writer) predicted it would be a matter of days, weeks, or months at most before Assad’s fall. But...

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Syrian rebels appealed for U.S. airstrikes to counter a new offensive by the Islamic State in the northern province of Aleppo that could reshape the battlefield in Syria. The surprise assault, launched over the weekend, opened a new front in the multi-pronged war being waged by the extremist group across Iraq and Syria, and it underscored the Islamic State’s capacity to catch its enemies off guard. The push — which came on the heels of the miltants’ capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra and the western Iraqi city of Ramadi late last month — took them...

Thousands of civilians have fled their homes in northern Syria as Kurdish forces carry out what appears to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Sunni Arabs. A source from one of the largest humanitarian organisations working inside Syria told The Times that the Kurdish people’s protection units (YPG) — the west’s closest allies in the war against Islamic State — have been burning Arab villages in areas of northeastern Syria under their control.

Armenians in Turkey who opted to live as Muslims to avoid mistreatment are recovering their true identities in collective baptisms. The latest such baptism came in May when 12 Armenians from Dersim (Tunceli) recovered their identities. The saga of Armenians who were compelled to live as Muslims goes back to 1915 massacres. Armenian children were adopted by Muslim families, women married Muslim men and some families converted to Islam to save their lives. These Armenians, who for a century were forced to conceal their identities, are trying to return to their roots. This activity is more prevalent among Anatolian Armenians,...

It is hardly surprising that many Americans see ISIS as a vastly more brutal, more threatening version of Al Qaeda -- especially given the many Republican presidential candidates climbing over each other with plans to obliterate the group. But the perception is mistaken. While Al Qaeda’s strategy focuses on catastrophic attacks against the United States, ISIS seeks to capture and hold territory for its caliphate and to stoke a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia. The group has no known experience carrying out long-distance covert operations, and no senior federal official has yet pointed to any ISIS plotting against the...