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the lack of trust for Arabs among Turkey’s intellectuals and the rest of the public is based on historical developments. According to the Turkish Historical Society, in 1916, Sheriff of Mecca Hussein bin Ali subscribed to the British promise of independence, rose against the Ottomans and became an instrument of dividing the Ottoman empire among Christian states. This “Arab betrayal” has left a scar in Turkish minds.

renowned historian Ilber Ortayli, who said, “Palestine, which rose against the Ottomans and betrayed them, today is paying for this betrayal with its life and property.”

AKP came to power in 2003 and adopted a policy of rapprochement with Arabs

Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.

the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.

Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting

Despite the collapse of its so-called "caliphate" in the Middle East, and the killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, however, ISIL remains a growing and evolving threat in other parts of the world, especially in Africa's restive Sahel region. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the prodigy of ISIL there, is going from strength to strength, bolstering its membership and carrying out attacks.

Most of the states that have territory in the Sahel are grappling with the destructive effects of climate change, poverty, food shortages, ethnic conflicts and lack of effective democratic governance. There is little opportunity for the people in the region to receive an education and find work that would allow them to sustain their families. Moreover, they live in fear of being attacked by one of the numerous local armed groups that are active there. This is causing many to embark on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to reach Europe's shores and seek sanctuary there. All this creates an ample opportunity for terror groups like ISIL to expand their influence over the region.

Burkina Faso is now stuck in a vicious cycle where the problems that allowed armed groups like ISIL to infiltrate the country are being exacerbated by their presence, while the resulting desperation is causing more people to join them.

The global system is built around sovereign states, and it shows. This is an enormous problem for groups that define themselves, or are defined by others, as distinct from the country within whose borders they happen to reside, and it’s also terrible as a framework for navigating the global politics of a rapidly changing world.

Sovereignty is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which was pivotal in shifting conceptions of government toward a secular state with entire authority inside inviolable territorial borders. Designed as a diplomatic solution to catastrophic religious wars among feudal, monarchical territories, its tenets have persisted into the modern world largely due to the entrenched power of those states, jealously guarding their unfettered rule over their slice of geography.

as the power of monarchy eroded and European countries needed something else to inspire loyalty among their citizens, the ideal of the nation-state—that the people within those arbitrary borders would feel some sort of collective identity—became popular. This led to more wars as European states expelled or converted anyone who didn’t fit their concept of nation: not French enough, not German enough, not Italian enough. They also spread this idea to their colonies, exporting successive waves of destructive conflicts.

Millions of people are being pushed towards hunger by the coronavirus pandemic, which could end up killing more people through lack of food than from the illness itself, Oxfam has warned.

Closed borders, curfews and travel restrictions have disrupted food supplies and incomes in already fragile countries, forcing an extra million people closer to famine in Afghanistan and heightening the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, where two-thirds already live in hunger.

Oxfam said that up to 12,000 people could die from hunger every day globally – 2,000 more than died from Covid-19 each day in April

From Tripoli to Tyre, and Beirut to Baalbek, Lebanese have been chanting the same slogan: “All of them means all of them.” Since its independence, Lebanon has been ruled by a clique of politicians and political families who have used sectarianism, corruption and clientelism to cling to power and amass incredible wealth. Now protesters are calling for them all to be removed, from Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah to Prime Minister Saad Hariri, with nervous responses from the leaders themselves. Middle East Eye takes a quick look at some of the more prominent figures and parties in the protesters’ sights.

The Hariri family was once the darling of Saudi Arabia, but apparently no longer

Aoun is one of Lebanon’s many leaders who played an active and violent part in the country’s 1975-90 civil war. As head of the army in the war’s latter years, Aoun fought bitter conflicts with the occupying Syrian military and the Lebanese Forces paramilitary headed by his rival, Samir Geagea. In 1989, Aoun found himself besieged in the presidential palace in Baabda, where he now resides as president, and fled Syrian troops to the French embassy, which granted him exile.

The authoritarian normalization that continues to mark relations between Turkey’s political and military echelons since the 2016 failed coup is now affecting the policymaking process in the country's defense industry. The industry is the new favorite of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the bruising financial crisis heavily hit his former favorite sector, construction.

Four major reasons are behind Erdogan's piqued interest in the defense industry: First, Erdogan's popular support drastically increased after Turkey’s Oct. 9 incursion into Syria, known as Operation Peace Spring. Second, the defense industry is a good tool for producing success stories to divert public attention at a time of economic crisis. Third, success in the defense realm offers political gains in foreign policy. And finally, it creates profitable export opportunities to several countries including Qatar, Pakistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and some African nations.

In December 2017, Erdogan issued a decree placing TSKGV under his auspices. Since then, however, Erdogan hasn’t quite managed to establish full control over the institution, which mainly remains under the influence of the retired generals.

The Trump administration is quietly fighting a new package of sanctions on Russia, The Daily Beast has learned. A Trump State Department official sent a 22-page letter to a top Senate chairman on Tuesday making a wide-ranging case against a new sanctions bill. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham—usually a staunch ally of the White House—introduced the legislation earlier this year. It’s designed to punish Russian individuals and companies over the Kremlin’s targeting of Ukraine, as well as its 2016 election interference in the U.S., its activities in Syria, and its attacks on dissidents. 

Despite Trump’s strong opposition, the bill passed out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning. Five senators opposed it, all Republicans: Chairman Jim Risch, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Johnny Isacson, Sen. John Barrasso, and Sen. Ron Johnson. 

With a combined total of 14 journalists killed, Latin America is now as deadly for journalists as the Middle East., with all of its wars.

more journalists (59%) are now being killed in countries at peace than in war zones. At the same time, there has been a 2% increase in journalists being deliberately murdered or targeted.

Worldwide, a total of 389 journalists are currently in prison in connection with their work, 12% more than last year. Nearly half of these journalists are being held by three countries: China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The coronavirus pandemic has opened up similar opportunities for a range of terrorists, insurgents, and criminal organizations. Across the world, they are already seeking to acquire political legitimacy through the provision of public health services, especially in countries and regions where the government has been either unwilling or unable to help.

it is not just terrorist and insurgent groups taking advantage of the crisis to demonstrate an effort toward effective governance. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs have worked assiduously to enforce a curfew in the notoriously ungoverned slums where they operate.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the term “ungoverned spaces” entered the popular lexicon when discussing areas that terrorist groups sought out in which to train, plan, and conduct operations. Areas that few in the West had ever heard about—South America’s Tri-Border Area, the Sahel in North Africa, and Southeast Asian archipelagos—were all tagged with this label. But the term itself is an unfortunate misnomer. No area is truly ungoverned. Rather, nonstate actors and substate groups provide alternative forms of governance to people in these places. And, more often than not, they do so through provision of services that reinforce their social status and lend them a sense of political legitimacy that governments in faraway capital cities lack altogether.

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.

Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.