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Yasa found himself semi-conscious in hospital along with nine other protesters after Erdogan’s bodyguards and thugs for hire set upon them. One yelled “Die Kurd” as they kicked and struck the demonstrators with discernible glee. Lucy Usoyan, a young Yazidi woman who was repeatedly hit on the head, fell unconscious, despite Yasa’s best efforts to shield her. The images captured on video and later subjected to forensic scrutiny leave no doubt as to what had transpired. “I didn’t know if I would ever see my children again,” Yasa said. “I thought I was dying.”

In May, Yasa and a dozen and a half fellow victims filed a civil action lawsuit in US federal court against Turkey. They are demanding at least $300 million in compensation on multiple counts ranging from bodily harm to psychological trauma — including, in at least one case, damage to conjugal relations.

the tort case against the Republic of Turkey rests on the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act, which stipulates seven violations for which foreign governments can be sued in US courts. “I’d love to see Turkey argue that under US law, ‘We are entitled to beat up people on the streets of Washington, DC,'” Perles said. “No dictator gets to come to my country and beat up citizens of my country on my watch. I’ll take that argument all the way to the Supreme Court.”

The ban on the Ülkü Ocaklari (Idealist Hearths), also known by the moniker “Gray Wolves,” is framed by various national parliaments as a crackdown on Turkish far-right extremism. In its annual Turkey report released last month, the European Parliament urged the EU and its member states to consider adding the Gray Wolves to the EU terrorist list and to ban their associations. This constitutes the first official bid to link the organization to terrorism. Firing back a rapid denunciation, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç described the Gray Wolves as part of “a legal movement, which is associated with a long-established political party in Turkey.”

The Ülkücü movement is the outgrowth of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (which later became the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP) led by the party chairperson Devlet Bahçeli, a seasoned politician who has commanded do-or-die loyalty among the party’s rank and file since taking over from Alparslan Turkes after his death in 1997. The Idealist Hearths or Gray Wolves began as the party’s youth movement in the 1960s but gained notoriety for its daredevil brand of Turkish nationalism and nefarious role in armed violence in the Cold War modus operandi of the 1970s and 1980s that targeted so-called internal enemies in the murky underworld of the Turkish “deep state.” Among the more notorious members of the Gray Wolves is Mehmet Ali Ağca, the gunman behind the assassination attempt 40 years ago against Pope John Paul II, said to be “in revenge” for an attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

Legend, folklore, and a romanticized history of conquest and victory are central to the Ülkücü worldview, not unlike other ideologically organized movements elsewhere. In Turkic mythology, a gray wolf in pre-Islamic times led ancient Turkish tribes out of the wilderness of Central Asia, where they had been trapped for centuries following military defeat, and into salvation.

Israel’s approach toward the crisis, which has been marked by the redeployment of surveillance technology that had been previously dedicated to counterterrorism efforts toward tracking the pandemic

By mid-March, as the coronavirus spread through the country, the Israeli government invoked emergency powers to begin using cellphone tracking data to retrace the movements of those believed to be infected. The government used this data to order quarantines on individuals through contact tracing

the government turned to the Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet (better known these days in Israel by the acronym Shabak) —to use its vast database of cellphone tracking data to map the outbreak.

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

a resurgence of attacks by the Islamic State group in northern Iraq

In neighboring Syria, IS attacks on security forces, oil fields and civilian sites have also intensified.

the militant group is taking advantage of governments absorbed in tackling the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing slide into economic chaos.

Turkish nationalists have been trying to reframe Talaat’s historical role as a hero for a long time, but with increasing intensity in recent times. As a result, he has become a hero for parts of the Turkish public who have been fed a mixture of the official state ideology and its fabricated history as well as the slightly varying narrative lines of nationalists and neo-nationalists in more recent times

“There is a clear document trail connecting him to the genocide during these years, and he ended his career as grand vizier of the empire in 1918, when he fled to Germany. Along with other leaders, he was court-martialed in 1919 and sentenced in absentia. He was not returned by Germany to Ottoman authorities, but he was assassinated there in 1921 by Armenian Revolutionary Federation [ARF] member Soghomon Tehlirian,”

Talaat Pasha has remained a powerful symbol for Turkish denialism. His sublimation is the work of Turkish ultranationalists, the center right and the bulk of Islamists, but the myth is also respected by large numbers of Kemalists, the leading circles of the Republican People’s Party [CHP] and some parts of the marginal Turkish left,

Guided by the twin logics of energy security and energy independence, American actions and alliances in region became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very thing the United States sought to eliminate in the Middle East—insecurity—became a major consequence of America’s growing and increasingly militarized entanglement.

In effect, the essential relationship of dependency between the United States and the Middle East has never been “oil for security.” It has in fact been oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarization and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security.

Oil’s violent geopolitics is often assumed to result from the immense power its natural scarcity affords to those who can control it. Recent developments in global hydrocarbon markets, which saw negative prices on April 20, 2020 have once again put this scarcity myth to bed

The parallels between Lebanon and Sicily are many, and may hold clues for why the judiciary has struggled to impose the law on societies that, in many regards, were built on foundations opposing the state. Both are places that have been conquered over the centuries by multiple powers, so that they have absorbed contradictory, even clashing, political legacies. In Sicily and Lebanon, traditional social ties have tended to displace mediation by the institutions of the modern state, while religion has been an instrument of debilitating illiberalism as well as an occasional driver of reform. And in both, the preferred traditional response to the abuses present all around has generally been silence

The mafia and the political class that so thoroughly dominated Lebanon at the end of the country’s civil war in 1990 had a very similar trajectory. Both exploited major transitional periods in their country’s history to, schizophrenically, anchor their criminal networks in the mechanisms of legitimate governance.

political leaders neutralized popular outrage by manipulating sectarian sensitivities, so that the investigating magistrate, Tareq Bitar, became a target of the political forces whose officials he later sought to question. Sicily was ahead of Lebanon in having a judiciary that was willing to go all the way, despite the tremendous risks, and politicians with residues of self-respect.

On May 12, a source from the Nation’s Future Party said in an interview with al-Araby al-Jadeed that the party members and pro-Sisi MPs do not discuss “thorny” issues such as the new administrative capital without obtaining prior permission. Party members take instructions from the National Security Agency and "do not talk about any topic under the dome of parliament or in the media without the agency’s prior permission,” the source said.

“the launch of so many national megaprojects at the same time made the Egyptian economy vulnerable to any setbacks," such as  the coronavirus crisis, the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's attack on Ukraine caused a severe global economic crisis that was felt in Egypt due to the suspension of wheat imports from those countries, as well the decline in tourism. Russians and Ukrainians constituted 30% to 40% of the total incoming tourists to Egypt.