Free Republic

A poster at a shop in Madinah announces its boycott of all Turkish products. RIYADH/JEDDAH: The popular campaign boycotting Turkish products in Saudi Arabia has gained further momentum over the past few days, attracting the support of commentators and businesses. “Turkish political mess-ups and interference in countries of the Middle East is the real reason behind this popular boycott of Turkish products,” said Dr. Hamdan Al-Shehri, a political analyst and international relations scholar. “Turkish President Erdogan changed his previous policy of minimizing Turkish problems and instead exported it to the outside. Turkey has been threatening the region just as Iran...

Tucked away in the southern Transcaucasian highlands, which is the very headwaters of the Middle East, is a small country by the name of Armenia which parallels the history of Israel in many surprising, striking ways. Armenians have inhabited this area of the world for thousands of years. They even claim Noah’s heritage as the famed Mt. Ararat dominates the skyline of Armenia’s capital, Yerevan ....

A Russian fighter jet on Sunday reportedly came dangerously close to an Israeli passenger aircraft while on route from the Greek island of Rhodes to Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport. The incident occurred when the Israir flight entered Cypriot air space. No casualties or damage were reported. The Russian Sukhoi Su-27 came to within a mile from the Israir Airbus A320, a distance considered unsafe, for several minutes before air traffic controllers in Cyprus warned it away. Russia has fighter aircraft stationed in nearby Syria, where it is assisting the Assad regime in the civil war, leading to crowded skies in...

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh — On the front line, the stench is overwhelming. The remains of fighters have been lying there for weeks. In the trenches, there is fear. The Armenians are defenseless against the Azerbaijani drones that hover overhead and kill at will. At the military graveyard, bulldozers have scraped away a hillside. It is already lined with two rows of new graves, along with soon-to-be-filled, freshly dug, rectangular holes. The three-week-old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over a disputed territory in the Caucasus Mountains, where Europe meets Asia, has settled into a brutal war of attrition, soldiers and civilians said...

About 1,000 members of Syrian militant groups deployed by Turkey to support the Azerbaijani advance in the Nagorno-Karabakh region have laid down their arms and refused to participate in hostilities, Armenian media outlets and military-affiliated sources claimed. They insist that Syrian militants were just used as cannon fodder and did not receive their promised money. According to sources loyal to the Syrian opposition, the number of Turkish proxies that died in the war with Armenia has exceeded 110. Earlier, reports appeared from Syrian sources , claiming that about 400 members of Turkish-backed militant groups deployed in Syria’s northwest had refused...

Turkey has “activated” a Russian-made S-400 anti-aircraft defense system to track F-16 fighter jets flown by several other NATO members, U.S. lawmakers and analysts suspect. “The whole problem with having the S-400 integrated is in order to do that, you have to betray some of the codes and some of the, basically, NATO technology to the Russians,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin said. “And it appears that that's what they've done.” Western officials have eyed Turkey’s turn to Russian arms dealers with alarm in recent years, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defied the threat of U.S. sanctions to...

Why Armenians are supporting Trump? They explain:

Will the world ignore a second Armenian genocide at the hands of jihadis? One and half million Armenians Christians were ethically cleansed, slaughtered by the Islamic Ottoman empire. Turkey refuses to recognize or even acknowledge the genocide, let alone apologize. The silence and sanction surrounding the Armenian genocide makes a continuation of their Islamic slaughter inevitable. Fast forward to the present. Armenia accused Azerbaijan of firing missiles into the capital of the separatist territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, while Azerbaijan said several of its towns and its second-largest city were attacked. The region of Nagorno-Karabakh lies inside Azerbaijan but has been under...

Bernard Lewis, the preeminent Middle East researcher of the past few generations, said after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rose to power that Iran could turn into Turkey, and Turkey might morph into Iran. Lewis meant that after the mullah regime was ousted, Iran might fulfil the hope for moderation and contribution that were once hung on Turkey, whereas Erdogan could drive the modern and moderate Turkey he inherited into destructive radicalism in the style of the Islamic Revolution. For now, the threat from Ankara is materializing, but not the hopes for Tehran. In addition to the disaster he has...

Today's top stories 13.10.20; 1) The Israeli Parliament, or Knesset in Hebrew, formally opened its winter session -- amid domestic reports of a reemerging political crisis that may yet again force the Jewish State into another round of national elections.2) A Cargo Vessel makes a first official maritime transport of Emirati goods to the state of Israel.3) Tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean are once again on the rise, after Turkey announced its decision to conduct exploration works for offshore energy sources in disputed waters, south of the Greek Island of Kastellorizo -- which is situated near Turkey's southern coast.Turkey-Greece tensions...

To a West where no one seems to want to fight anymore or care anymore about their own traditions, where they spit on their own history, topple their statues and erase their own culture, where the land no longer sends any echo, the Armenians, small, scattered around the world, forgotten and barricaded, now at war for Nagorno against the Islamic Ummah led by Turkey, show us a path in which we do not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed. Half of Nagorno's population, 75,000 people, has been displaced due to Turkish-backed Azerbaijan attacks. We must hope they resist. I have just...

An array of Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups have agreed to suspend rocket attacks on U.S. forces on condition that Iraq's government presents a timetable for a withdrawal of American troops, one of the groups said on Sunday. "The factions have presented a conditional ceasefire," said Mohammed Mohi, spokesman for the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah group. "It includes all factions of the (anti-U.S.) resistance, including those who have been targeting U.S. forces," he told Reuters.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reports that the death toll of the Turkish-backed Syrian Jihadist mercenaries fighting in Azerbaijan is rising, SOHR activists have documented the death of 26 Syrian fighters who were killed in the past 48 hours in raging battles in the Nagorno-Karabakh on the side of Azerbaijan against Armenia. Accordingly, the total number of fatalities among the Turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries since Turkey threw them into the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has reached 107. On the other hand, reliable sources have informed SOHR that the Turkish government is preparing over 400 fighters of “Sultan Murad”, “Al-Hamzat...

INTERNATIONAL | President Recep Tayyip Erdogan works to Islamize Christian sites TURKEY: The Turkish Islamic Foundation destroyed the historic St. Georgios Greek Orthodox Church in Bursa on Wednesday, seven years after local officials transferred the property to the group’s control. Authorities emptied Bursa of its Greek Orthodox population a century ago, and the church became a mosque in the 1920s. But in 2006 it was restored and for years served as a focal point for Greek-Turkish exchange and reconciliation, then was closed and lapsed into disrepair once the foundation took over. It follows a campaign by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan...

Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed a temporary ceasefire in the conflict in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the agreement just before 03:00 local time (01:00 BST), following 10 hours of talks in Moscow. The two countries will now begin "substantive" talks, he said. More than 300 people have died and thousands displaced since the latest violence in the long-running conflict broke out on 27 September. The hostilities will be halted from midday (08:00 GMT) on Saturday, to allow an exchange of prisoners and the recovery of dead bodies. Nagorno-Karabakh is run by ethnic Armenians although...

An organized campaign is under way against US targets. Who is responsible? The ongoing, steady tempo of rocket attacks against US and official targets in Iraq continued this week. On Monday, two Katyusha rockets fell on the Jadriya neighborhood of Baghdad, close to the fortified Green Zone. There were no casualties.Earlier, on September 27, five civilians (two women and three children) were killed when a Katyusha aimed at Baghdad airport fell short and fell on a private house. The five were members of the same family. On September 30, in an additional escalation, four rockets were launched at the Iraqi...

Minutes after the truce took force, the Armenian military accused Azerbaijan of shelling the area near the town of Kapan in southeastern Armenia, killing one civilian. The Azerbaijani military, in turn, accused Armenia of striking the Terter and Agdam regions of Azerbaijan with missiles and then attempting to launch offensives in the Agdere-Terter and the Fizuli-Jabrail areas. Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov charged that “conditions for implementing the humanitarian cease-fire are currently missing” amid the continuing Armenian shelling. The latest outburst of fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces began Sept. 27 and left hundreds of people dead in the biggest...