Free Republic

Rahim Esenov, one of the most well-known Turkmen writers who openly refused to follow the orders of the Central Asian nation's authoritarian leadership, has died in Ashgabat at the age of 95. Esenov's relatives and friends told RFE/RL on April 25 that the writer died over the weekend. No cause of death was given. Esenov openly rejected the cult of personality that was created by Turkmenistan’s first President Saparmurat Niyazov in the 1990s and was blacklisted for his refusal to go along with the leader. He rejected Niyazov's demand to change the plot of his book The Crowned Wanderer which...

It was reported recently that the USA and the Taliban have reached a peace agreement on Afghanistan that will allow US forces to leave that country 17 years after they invaded it on October, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Al Qaeda..... A large number of the terrorists that filled the country were killed, some were captured and some escaped to other countries. The impression left by the swift operation was that the Taliban would never gain back its strength and that Afghanistan would never again be a terror state. And then last week it was reported that America...

Caption -- Borobudur: hardly Chinese The author is former foreign secretary of India sibalkanwal@gmail.com The West has built a lot of myths about China which others, including in India, have accepted without challenge. That China was for centuries the dominant power in Asia and is now on the way to recovering that lost status is one such myth. This historical distortion is serving to legitimize China's hegemonic ambitions, as if China has the right to recover its natural position in Asia and any resistance amounts to denying the Chinese their due. This explains why even when China is aggressive...

Iran is an artificial country which includes a large number of ethnic groups: Persians, Azars, Kurds, Turkmen, Baloch, Arabs and more.... Southwestern Iran, the Khuzistan region, is home to the Arab minority group, but that is where most of the oil and gas resources are to be found underground, right under the feet of that Arab minority. They are Shiites, exactly like the majority Persians, but are treated with disdain by the government. In the past, the region was called Arabistan to allude to the ethnic group living there, but after the 1925 Persian Conquest, the Persians changed its name...

BEIRUT (AFP) - Syrian Turkmen rebel fighters have seized three villages from the Islamic State group near the Turkish border in clashes that killed 13 from the ethnic minority, a monitor said Saturday. "This is the first time that Turkmen fighters have led the battle against IS in the area, and that comes after they received support from Turkey," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor. He did not provide details on the alleged assistance. The Britain-based group said the 13 fighters killed since Friday were members of the Sultan Murad Brigades, made up...

Activists in Moscow, belonging to a youth wing of the conservative Rodina party, put a life-size inflatable doll of Erdogan in a coffin and delivered it to the Turkish embassy. - Getty Images Moscow's fury over Ankara's downing of a Russian warplane on the Syrian border was on full display today as pro-government activists staged anti-Turkey rallies, even parading a life-size doll of its president in a coffin. In Crimea, a group of young people gathered around a hay effigy with the face of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set up on the main square of Simferopol. Videos shot at...

(Reuters) - The United States carried out air strikes on Saturday against Islamic State fighters near the besieged Shi'ite town of Amerli in northern Iraq and airdropped humanitarian aid to civilians trapped there, the Pentagon said. President Barack Obama authorized the new military action, broadening U.S. operations in Iraq amid an international outcry over the threat to Amerli's mostly ethnic Turkmen population. U.S. aircraft delivered over a hundred bundles of emergency supplies and more aid was dropped from British, French and Australian planes, officials said, signaling headway in Obama’s efforts to draw allies into the fight against Islamic State. Iraqi...

'Arab Spring': The chilly cruel winter reality of Arab racism and Islamic bigotry Not that ethnic racism and religious bigotry weren't rampant before the so-called "Arab spring" sprung about. But the intolerance tide seems to be only worsening, and without an Arab dictator to "hold" various factions together, vulnerability expand, risks rise. --- RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY: As the D.B. puts it: "Violence Against Egypt's Copts in an Intolerant Arab Spring.. The elephant in the room of the Arab Spring is now the mistreatment of minority communities—Christians and others—across the Arab world." FPM asks: Hillary Clinton Promises to Save Egypt's Christians? ......

Human rights monitors are concerned over the reported detention of hundreds of ethnic Turkmen by Iranian authorities. The detentions followed the killing of an ethnic Turkmen fisherman, Husamettin Khadivar, by Iranian maritime security officers on December 28th. According to the U.S. State Department, about two percent of Iran’s population, over one-million-three-hundred-thousand people, are ethnic Turkmen. Mr. Khadivar was fishing without a license in the Caspian sea near the Iranian city of Bandar-e Torkman. Abdulgafur Setaesh is Director of the Center for Human Rights of Turkmenstan of Iran, a Canada-based human rights monitoring group. Mr. Setaesh said friends and relatives of...

Facing ethnic revolts in both Baluchistan and Kur distan, the last thing that Tehran might have wanted was a similar problem in another corner of Iran with a non-Persian majority. Yet that seems to be happening in Golestan, one of Iran's 30 provinces, with the ethnic Turkmen community seething with anger against Tehran. It all started on Jan. 4, when a gunboat of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot and killed a 20-year-old Turkmen fisherman in the coastal waters of the Caspian Sea. The authorities claim that the fisherman, one Hissmauddin Khadivar, had been part of an illegal fishing expedition...

Excerpt - TUZ KHURMATU (AFP) - A suicide truck bomber ripped the heart out of a northern Iraqi village on Saturday, killing at least 105 people and demolishing dozens of homes and shops, police and medics said. Ambulances and private cars ferried dozens of bloodied corpses and wounded civilians to clinics in the nearby town of Tuz Khurmatu and the provincial capital Kirkuk, where desperate relatives waited for news of the missing. Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from Iraq's Shiite Turkmen minority living...

The government of Turkmenistan has for years practiced a domestic policy that can only be described as "Turkmenization." Most non-ethnic Turkmen officials have been purged, and authorities have gone further in insisting, unofficially, that residents speak Turkmen and dress in what is regarded as a Turkmen fashion. Even schoolchildren are subject to the unwritten policies, which have led to the emigration of ethnic Russians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks. The latest manifestation is the arrival in neighboring Uzbekistan of young women who married Turkmen citizens but were rejected registration and tossed out of the country, along with their children. Ziyoda Ruzimova lived...

Several northwestern cities in Iran have recently been rocked by demonstrations and riots by ethnic Azerbaijani citizens. They were protesting a cartoon published in an official government newspaper that depicted the Azerbaijani minority as a cockroach and instructed people to deny it food until it learns to speak Persian. Last Sunday, thousands of Iranian Azerbaijanis gathered outside Parliament in Tehran to chant in their native Turkic language and demand the rights to operate schools in their own language. As his police forces heavy-handedly dispersed the demonstrators, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the loyalty of the Azerbaijani citizens...

Long hair or beards will no longer be tolerated in Turkmenistan, following a presidential decree. President Saparmurat Niyazov said on Thursday that the Education Ministry should be in charge of checking people's hair and facial arrangements. The self-styled "Turkmenbashi the Great" also announced the launch of a textbook on good behaviour to add to a school curriculum already dominated by his "philosophical" works. The volume, entitled Upbringing, is based on the "wisdom of the ancient traditions of the Turkmen people who through the ages developed clear-cut norms of behaviour and socialisation". Dictator Niyazov has clung to power since the end...

In Kirkuk, Hussein's Fall Released Old Rivalries Among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens KIRKUK, Iraq -- This ethnically mixed city sitting atop vast oil resources has become dangerously polarized, with Kurds and Arabs vying to dominate it in the new Iraq. Talk of ethnic brotherhood has ended, replaced by heated, exclusionist rhetoric and violence. Kurdish gunfire killed at least two demonstrators at a New Year's Eve march by Arabs and Turkmens -- Kirkuk's third major ethnic group -- against a measure of autonomy for Kurds. Within a week, unknown gunmen killed three Kurds. Over at the Turkmen Culture Center and Billiards...

On Monday, Kofi Annan will have a chance to play "a vital role" in Iraq that the U.S. has promised. Iraqi, U.S. and British representatives will troop into his New York office with a request: inform the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that the world body supports a reasonable timetable for Iraqi elections, not a premature election that would amount to a coup by Iraq's Shiite majority. As the U.N thus demonstrates its nation-building usefulness, the U.S. will face its own delicate task: to persuade the Kurds in the north not to demand so much autonomy that it may endanger...

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. forces killed two Iraqis and wounded two others while intervening in clashes between Kurds and Turkmen in the ethnically divided northern Iraqi oil hub of Kirkuk, an army spokeswoman said Saturday. The fighting marked a flare-up of tension around Kirkuk between Kurds and Turkmen, two minority groups at odds over their share of political power in a city that both say the deposed Iraqi government tried to drive them from in order to Arabise the site of Iraq (news - web sites)'s richest oil reserves. Major Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Army's 4th...

Kirkuk is liberated from Saddam's rule, but old ethnic tensions threaten to engulf it in new horrors, writes Ed O'Loughlin. Nobody knows how many people live in Kirkuk. The size of the population and its ethnic breakdown are so sensitive that every census since 1957 has been rigged or suppressed. Three races claim this town as their own - Arab, Turkoman and Kurd - and the oil fields on its fringe make it a prize worth having. Each of the three is armed, each is frightened of the others, and each believes it can call on outside forces. Don't let...

<p>Some miles over the border into the Saddam-controlled part of Northern Iraq, a local contact told me that Saddam Hussein has placed tanks and explosives in narrow streets to maximize collateral damage. He has also forcibly billeted troops and loyalist cadres in civilian homes in readiness for street fighting -- and to prevent the populace from fleeing. Saddam has done this in neighborhoods mostly populated by the Turkmen and Assyrian Christian minorities, whom he has repressed and decimated. His troops, though, are unlikely to survive their hosts' ire once the shooting starts. Back across the border in the Kurdish zone I returned to Irbil, the stronghold of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) chief. (Barzani sports a silent-movie moustache above a chubby figure and has a way with native headwrapping that rivals Yasser Arafat.) I have been living here in the guise of a businessman. Not being registered as a journalist means I don't need a KDP minder "for my protection." In the age-old fashion, such minders have a distinct influence on what foreign journalists see and think. In this case, journalists have not noted the nefarious activities of the Kurdish authorities in charge of the northern "no-fly" zone. Perhaps the media think that it's all too inside-baseball for readers back home. That is a mistake. Within days, the Kurds could be in charge of the oil towns of Kirkuk and Mosul, and their habits of government will matter very much.</p>

ANKARA - U.S. President George W. Bush's Adviser for Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said on Tuesday that Iraqi opposition had decided to cooperate fully with coalition forces. Addressing journalists following the meeting of Iraqi opposition groups, Khalilzad said that they had held a very beneficial meeting. He said that Iraqi opposition had decided to cooperate fully with coalition forces and deploy all their forces to the service of the coalition forces. Khalilzad added that Iraqi opposition groups had reached a compromise to expend efforts to prevent population movements and to call on their people to cooperate with coalition forces.'' Khalilzad said...