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Pedro Gonçalves

Kurdish separatists call for 'uprising' in Turkey - TURKEY - KURDS - FRANCE 24 - 0 views

www.france24.com/...-uprising-military-separatists

Turkey Kurdistan

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Kurdish separatists in Turkey on Friday called for an "uprising" after an air force raid killed 35 villagers near the Iraqi border in what the ruling party admitted could have been a blunder.
  • "According to initial reports, these people were smugglers and not terrorists," said Huseyin Celik, vice-president of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP).
  • The PKK took up arms in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives. It is labelled a terrorist organisation by Ankara and much of the international community.
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  • The protest in Istanbul on Thursday called by the BDP drew 2,000 people in the city's Taksim Square. Afterwards, several hundred youths shouting pro-PKK slogans threw stones at riot police, who responded with water cannon and tear gas, making several arrests.
  • Clashes between Kurdish rebels and the army have escalated in recent months. The Turkish military launched an operation on militant bases inside northern Iraq in October after a PKK attack killed 24 soldiers in the border town of Cukurca, the army's biggest loss since 1993.
Pedro Gonçalves

Homemade bomb on board plane raises tension ahead of Iran elections | World news | guar... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mb-plane-tehran-iran-elections

Iran US Baluchistan Sistan-Baluchistan Khuzestan Ali Khamenei Hassan Firouzabadi Jundullah

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 01 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Rising political tensions in Iran ahead of watershed presidential elections on 12 June intensified today with the discovery of a homemade bomb on board a domestic airliner. The incident closely followed a fatal attack on a mosque that hardline Iranian leaders blamed on the US, Israel and Britain.
  • The Ahvaz incident followed an apparent suicide bombing on Thursday at a mosque in Zahedan, in Sistan-Baluchistan province in south-eastern Iran, which killed 25 people and wounded more than 100. Three men convicted of planning the explosion were publicly executed yesterday.
  • Khuzestan and Sistan-Baluchistan provinces have witnessed numerous attacks attributed to separatists, ethnic and religious groups, and mujahideen resistance fighters since the 1979 revolution. Oil-rich Khuzestan, which borders Iraq, is home to Iran's Arab minority. Sistan-Baluchistan, bordering Pakistan, has a high concentration of Sunni Muslims. Iran is predominantly Shia.
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  • A Sunni opposition group known as Jundullah (God's Soldiers), which Iran links to al-Qaida and the US, claimed responsibility for the mosque bomb.
  • The Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said a man claiming to represent Jundullah called it saying the bombing was a suicide attack aimed at Basiji forces, a religious militia, that were meeting in the mosque to co-ordinate election strategy.
  • Iran's leaders have repeatedly blamed US and Israeli "spy agencies" for arming and assisting insurgent groups, including dissident Kurds living in western Iran. They say the aim is to destabilise Iran and promote regime change.
  • Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader and a strong, public backer of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bid to win a second term, added his weight to the claims. "No one can doubt that the hands of … some interfering powers and their spying services are bloodied by the blood of the innocent," he said.
  • Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, Iran's armed forces chief of staff, also blamed outside forces, pointing the finger at Britain in particular. "The attempts made by colonialism, Zionism and on top of them England for sowing discord between Shias and Sunnis have yielded no result," he said.
  • Any direct or indirect US involvement in fomenting pre-election tensions is considered unlikely, given Obama's new policy of engagement with Iran. Israel, which believes Iran poses an existential threat, takes a harder line.
  • Unconfirmed reports published in the US last year said the Bush administration obtained $400m in "off-the-books" congressional funding to finance covert operations aimed at assisting minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organisations inside Iran. It is unclear whether these alleged operations have continued since Obama took office.
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Europe | Turkey hits Kurdish bases in Iraq - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8026364.stm

Turkey Kurdistan Kurds Iraq PKK

shared by Argos Media on 30 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq on Wednesday and Thursday, Turkish officials say. The raids came hours after the deaths of 10 Turkish soldiers in two separate attacks that were blamed on the rebels, the deadliest in months.
  • Air force planes bombed targets in the Iraqi border regions of Zap and Avasin-Basyan in the overnight raids.
  • On Wednesday, a powerful bomb blast killed nine soldiers in Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey. Suspected rebels also shot dead a soldier near the town of Semdinli, close to the border with Iraq.
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  • Turkish warplanes have often targeted rebel hideouts in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region, where Ankara says some 2,000 PKK guerrillas regularly stage hit-and-run attacks on Turkish territory.
Argos Media

Editorial - Mr. Obama and Turkey - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...04sat1.html

Turkey US EU Armenia

shared by Argos Media on 04 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • The Justice and Development Party scored an impressive re-election in 2007 after pursuing market-oriented policies that brought economic growth and more trade ties with the European Union. That conservative Muslim party also expanded human rights and brought Turkish law closer to European standards.
  • Those reforms have since stalled — partly because of opposition from civilian nationalists and generals who still wield too much clout. (The trial of 86 people accused of plotting a military coup is a reminder of the dark side of Turkish politics.)
  • But Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also seems to have lost enthusiasm for the European Union bid and the reforms that are the price of admission.
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  • President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has been especially unhelpful, making clear that he will do all he can to keep Turkey out of the European Union.
  • Mr. Obama must persuade Mr. Sarkozy and others that admitting Turkey — a Muslim democracy — is in everyone’s interest. And he must persuade Ankara that the required reforms will strengthen Turkey’s democracy and provide more stability and growth.
  • We are concerned about Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic tendencies. His government’s decision to slap the media mogul Aydin Dogan with a $500 million tax bill smacks of retaliation against an independent press that has successfully exposed government corruption.
  • Ankara has played a positive role, mediating indirect talks between Israel and Syria. With Washington’s encouragement, Mr. Erdogan could also use his relationships with Iran, Sudan and Hamas to encourage improved behavior.
  • Turkey’s cooperation with Iraqi Kurds has vastly improved. There are also reports that Turkey and Armenia may soon normalize relations.
  • We have long criticized Turkey for its self-destructive denial of the World War I era mass killing of Armenians. But while Congress is again contemplating a resolution denouncing the genocide, it would do a lot more good for both Armenia and Turkey if it held back. Mr. Obama, who vowed in the presidential campaign to recognize the event as genocide, should also forbear.
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