Turkey Archive

Turks will head to the polls again this Sunday, Nov. 1, to vote for a new parliament, after negotiations to form a coalition government failed following an inconclusive election in June. The vote comes amid considerable unrest in Turkey: In July, a two-year cease-fire agreement between the government and the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed, while a cell of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in southeastern Turkey has attacked several targets near the Syrian border and, recently, deeper in Turkey, including two suicide bombings that killed more than 100 people in Ankara earlier this month. Despite this unrest, opinions polls […]

In the aftermath of last weekend’s horrific bombings in Ankara, the Turkish people and international observers are trying to understand what went wrong with Turkey, a country that until very recently embodied the hopes of a more peaceful and interconnected Middle East. The answer inevitably leads to one man: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The evidence in the twin suicide attack that killed almost 100 people, making it the deadliest in Turkey’s modern history, points to the self-declared Islamic State. And yet, many people, searching for the bigger picture in Turkey’s crisis, have turned angrily in Erdogan’s direction. Turkey’s president, until […]