This week’s parliamentary elections deepened Turkey’s democracy by, at long last, bringing the Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, into the political mainstream.The chief victor in this contest between four parties was the leftist People’s Democratic Party (HDP), ba

When voters in Turkey’s 81 provinces cast their votes in 175,000 ballot boxes in 970 districts in the June 7 parliamentary election, they could decide the fate of democracy in their country.If they give the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) a resounding mandate and up to

The Iraq war has become a fashionable issue in the run-up to the US presidential race, with the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and the entire range of Republican challengers trying to distance themselves for their support for the disastrous campaign waged by George W.

The fall of the strategic Iraqi city of Ramadi last weekend to Daesh amounts to a decisive blow to the confused and contradictory strategies US, European and Arab powers have adopted towards the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

The shock results of this past week’s British general election and of the March parliamentary elections in Israel demonstrated that opinion polls cannot be trusted. In both cases, pollsters predicted a close race: in Britain between the incumbent Conservatives and oppositi

This past week two damning reports have been issued about the conduct of Israeli forces in last summer’s 50-day war on Gaza. One, an internal UN report, covered Israeli attacks on seven UNRWA schools that had been identified by the agency as shelters for Palestinians drive

Instead of a broad uprising, there are only isolated cases where young Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers or settlers with whatever comes to hand, episodes that do not seem to worry either side very much. On the Palestinian side, a family grieves when their young folk are kill

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the threat of US military action against his country’s nuclear facilities if negotiators fail to reach a deal over the country’s nuclear programme by the end of June. The threat, he said, was an “old habit

Ever since Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat Al Nusra, facilitated the entry of Daesh fighters into the Yarmouk suburb of Damascus, commentators have been asking why Nusra enabled Daesh fighters to overrun the area. Daesh and Nusra have been fighting each other in northern