• The leader of one of the most popular political parties in Tunisia says his model for the development of democracy in the Muslim world is Turkey. Experts debate whether secularism could take root in countries like Egypt or Tunisia

  • Turkey seemed to be on course to fulfil its neo-Ottoman ambition and lead the Middle East. But the Arab uprisings, and in particular the Syrian crisis, exposed the limits of Ankara's influence

  • Turkey's opposition has criticized Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for rejecting Washington's offer to capture Kurdish terrorists using the U.S. tactic for finding and capturing Osama bin Laden

  • China has become the world's workshop and Europe has an insatiable appetite for its exports. Most now arrive on giant container ships. But as ports become clogged and delivery times critical, China is once again looking to the old land routes across Asia

  • The crisis Turkey has gone through was similar to what the EU is experiencing now. Banks went bankrupt. People's savings disappeared. Companies closed down. The Turkish economy shrank drastically. That crisis was a very important lesson

  • Turkey's national airline announced it has ordered 15 jet planes worth $4.7 billion from U.S. plane maker Boeing

  • A borderland is a region where history is constant: Everything is in flux. Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland occupy the borderland between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity

  • The United States' central challenge over the next several decades is to revitalize itself, while promoting a larger West and buttressing a complex balance in the East that can accommodate China's rising global status

  • Is there a new Hamas in the making, one ready to put down its arms and live in peace with Israel? Or is it the same old Islamist movement putting on the airs of moderation as it abandons its old friends Syria and Iran and makes new ones in Egypt, Turkey and Qatar?

  • Only the United States seems to have an affinity for protecting tiny, vulnerable countries. Israelis, anti-communist Chinese, Kurds, Greeks and Armenians have a few things in common. They have relatively small populations, aggressive neighbors, few strong allies, many expatriates and refugees in the United States, and a tragic history of persecution and genocide

  • The European Commission presented its annual Progress Report on Turkey, arriving at positive and negative conclusions regarding Turkey's stalled EU accession process

  • The expectations of the last ten years that the states surrounding the Black Sea would follow the example of the Balkan region and shape themselves into a security community have not been realized. Perceptions of stagnation have replaced the hopes of a working and stable geo-strategic framework, based on a balance of cooperation and conflicts

  • Turkish troops entered northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish separatists who ambushed and killed 24 Turkish soldiers in southern Turkey

  • With the opening of Turkey's parliament on October 1 and the start of work on replacing the country's constitution, members of the country's religious minority groups are hoping that years of institutional and legal discrimination will come to an end in the not-too-distant future

  • Once the preserve of fishing boats and yachts, in the space of just a few weeks the serene waters of the Eastern Mediterranean have become a field of contention. As Greek Cyprus begins exploiting its potentially vast gas and oil reserves, Turkey asserts its growing role as a regional power, and a worried Israel is pushing back

  • Turkey's bid to join the European Union has been on ice for years, but the economic bloc's financial woes have made the country's currency something of an honorary member

  • As the greatest beneficiary of the Arab Spring, Turkey is going head to head with both Syria and Israel

  • Meeting at a summit in New York, Balkan leaders delivered a strong message in favour of regional reconciliation and co-operation, despite lingering differences

  • Policymakers in Azerbaijan are facing a dilemma: can an enemy of a friend be a friend? Specifically, can Baku maintain cordial relations with both Turkey and Israel at the same time?

  • Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Cairo to crowds of cheering Egyptians, but analysts say he is likely getting a less enthusiastic reception in the corridors of power, as he encounters resistance to his bid to make his country the leading regional power

  • A fatal blast in Ankara and increasing violence in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast are overshadowing the country's long-awaited constitutional reform process.

  • No one quite knows how Syrian dissident Hussein Harmoush went from the safety of a Turkish refugee camp into the clutches of the regime he thought he had escaped. But his case has his fellow political exiles nervous

  • Whereas Turkey's foreign policy mantra used to be 'no problems with the neighbors,' Turkey now seems to want to become the chief bully in the eastern Mediterranean, escalating tensions between the NATO member and Israel, a key US ally

  • A triple diplomatic challenge to Israel from Turkey, Palestine and Egypt both reflects the region's political transformation and reveals the key flaw in Israel's attitude to its neighbors

  • Israel has little prospect of restoring its once-close ties to Turkey anytime in the near future and will likely find itself under pressure from Ankara in Egypt and in the Mediterranean

  • As the Kurdish political party's parliamentary boycott continues, an announcement of 'democratic autonomy' for Turkey's Kurds brings even more urgency to the issue

  • Turkey provides an interesting case study of a minor country becoming a great power

  • Social media has been a boon for democratization forces around the world. But a recent tragedy in Turkey helps highlights the fact that social media also has a potentially dark side for democratization efforts

  • The exploitation of the Cyprus' fuel resources may increase chances for rapprochement -- or undermine them

  • Aziz Tekin had the misfortune of becoming a news item when he became the 105th journalist in Turkey to be put behind bars

  • Turkey is viewed as having played the 'most constructive' role in the past year's events and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, emerged as the most admired leader by far in the region

  • While the renewed interest in Ottoman culture and history may be commercialisation to some, it can also provide a reference point for Turkish foreign policy and domestic politics

  • AKP's success has been based on its domination of the Turkish centre ground, and if that centre ground is against making concessions to the Kurds, it will be hard for the party to move any further than it has, even if it wants to

  • Not too long ago, when the military acted as the enforcer of a rigidly secular system, a politician in Turkey could be punished merely for reciting religious poetry. Now, with the military's influence waning and moderate Islamists firmly in charge of the machinery of state, government agencies are trying to punish a cartoonist, Bahadir Baruter, for blasphemy

  • Ankara's new independent image in Moscow could be threatened by the radar decision

  • Deterioration of ties between Turkey and Israel poses a heightened risk for the region, analysts say.

  • For many Westerners concerned with reaching a permanent accommodation with the east -- or specifically, the Middle East -- Mustafa Akyol is 'the acceptable face of Islam.' It is a phrase that has to be accompanied by quotes -- and a health warning.

  • Two renowned figures suggest that Greek Cyprus' presidency of the EU is an opportunity to correct nearly 40 years of history -- the reunification of Cyprus for the first time since the Turkish invasion of 1974

  • After the Syrian downing of a Turkish air force jet, some things are becoming clear. Turkey, while refraining from doing anything rash and doing all it can to get international and NATO backing for its diplomatic efforts, is also leaving itself with a military option for responding to Syria's action

  • They were either tools to stifle dissent and pursue Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's enemies, or they were a badly needed way to ensure democracy in Turkey and take on criminal gangs

  • Kosovo and Turkey have what former Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu describes as 'golden relations', strong political and economic ties bound together by religious and cultural affinities developed over more than five centuries of Ottoman rule

  • Turkey appears to be moving closer to creating a buffer zone across the Syrian border as the refugee situation worsens in the regional tinderbox

  • The discovery of large quantities of natural gas offshore Cyprus could give a push for ending the decades-long dispute dividing the island. But it could also end up ratcheting up tensions with Turkey

  • Speaking alongside leaders of the Balkan states, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan stressed the cultural and historical ties between Turkey and the Balkans, while calling on the region to overcome its troubled history to co-operate and integrate to form a common future

  • Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi urged Syria and Turkey to peacefully resolve their differences for the sake of security in the region

  • When Syria shot down an Israeli-upgraded Turkish fighter jet it was delivering a message that the air force, despite the defection of a senior pilot a day earlier, was still in control and a force to be reckoned with

  • Energy exploration is adding a new wrinkle to the Turkish-Greek rivalry over the island of Cyprus

  • An offer to build natural gas storage facilities may help Russia gain leverage in Turkey

  • The on-again, off-again bridge linking Egypt to Saudi Arabia via the Straits of Tiran has come back to life

  • With the recent arrest of a leading academic, concern is spreading among intellectuals in Turkey that they will have to think twice before voicing criticism of the government in the future

  • The railway deal aims to significantly reduce travel times, improve passenger and freight transport and increase competitiveness

  • Turkey's earthquake devastation accentuates widening economic gap between country's east and west

  • The catastrophic earthquake that struck eastern Turkey on October 23, and the ensuing aid and rescue effort, has brought wide sections of Turkish society together. But as the atmosphere in Gedikbulak attests, it has also at times underscored the bitter dispute dividing Turks and the country's Kurdish minority

  • For decades, thousands of Turks immigrated to the West, in particular Germany, in search of work. Now Turkey's economic prosperity has young Turks abroad looking homeward.

  • Syria's fragmented opposition is on the edge of forming their leadership, as the unrest in the country is about to enter its sixth month

  • There's a revolution taking place in the eastern Mediterranean and it's all about oil ... olive oil

  • Turkish politicians are expressing concern that the country's booming economy is at risk as the nation's consumers binge on buying and borrowing while Europe struggles to put out the debt fire in Greece

  • On Istanbul's main shopping street a Greek flag flutters from the Sismanoglu Megaron that contains Turkey's first private Modern Greek language school. But this is more than just another language school

  • It seems Turkey's generals, so long a force in the country's politics, are going out with a whimper, not a bang

  • Turkey has carried out a multi-dimensional and multi-regional foreign policy. With its EU membership prospects in limbo, the country has not only looked to the east, but also towards its 'near abroad' in the Balkans

  • Hopes are rising for the reunification of Cyprus following a string of positive statements by Turkey's foreign minister and the UN secretary-general

  • Turkey is changing fast. And it's modernizing fast. For my vacation this year, I hit the road in Turkey, with romantic memories (a few years old) of horse-drawn carriages and villages with economies powered by hay, dung, and ducks

  • There was an article a few days ago in The International Herald Tribune by Anthony Shadid, writing in Gaziantep, Turkey -- an old Hittite city, bordering Syria, strategic during the Crusader wars, center of Turkish resistance to the French occupation in 1920-21. He wrote of its people's nostalgia for the Ottoman past when Turks and Syrians 'were brothers'

  • Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) won recent Parliamentary elections, which means it will remain in power for a third term. The popular vote made the AKP the most popular party by far. More important, the AKP failed to win a super-majority, which would have given it the power to unilaterally alter Turkey's constitution

  • Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan clearly identifies more with the old transnational Ottoman sultanate than with Kemal Ataturk's modern, secular and Western nation-state. Indeed, he has bragged that he is a grandson of the Ottomans and announced that Turkey's new goal was to restore the might of the Ottoman Empire

  • Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces a fateful decision as he tries to square the need to cool an overheating economy with plans for a constitutional overhaul, economists said a day after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) emerged victorious in elections

  • Since the very beginning of the Arab uprisings, over and over again we've been hearing politicians, commentators -- almost everyone with an opinion -- express the ardent hope that new Arab governments will emulate 'the Turkish model,' a supposed moderate Islamic democracy. Well, think again

  • Tensions between Turkey and Israel have been growing, and at the core of their tensions lies their disagreement over foreign policies in Iran

  • Turkey's recent diplomatic differences with the United States and its sharpened deterioration of relations with Israel come from Turkey's desire to reestablish its role as a major influence in the Middle East and Central Asia, says F. Stephen Larrabee, an expert on Turkey

  • The great historical question is whether, at the end of the day, Iran will look more like Turkey, or Turkey like Iran

  • Turkey does not fit neatly into anyone's conception of the world order. For centuries, people have debated or fought over whether it is part of Europe, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, or Eurasia. Some see its current government as careening toward 'Islamist fascism'; others believe it is integrating into a basically pluralistic, secular, globalized international order

  • Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. When it comes to the Middle East, writes Stephen Kinzer, Washington has been doing just that. Hence, in Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future, he proposes that the United States needs to partner with Iran and Turkey to create a 'powerful triangle.'

  • See what's happening in Turkey, the West's old ally and new adversary. The danger to freedom there becomes ever more clear and present every day. But the tragedy of it can scarcely be apprehended without an appreciation of the dark past out of which this current Turkey arose, and to which it is about to return.