Turkey

President Erdogan can raise a crowd. As he travels to every corner of his huge country in the month before elections that could return him to the palace for another five years, tens of thousands turn out in sports halls, city squares and purpose-built rally grounds. His acerbic, bombastic public appearances, stage-managed with rock-star entrances and booming music, have become a hallmark of his brand of polished populism. The 15,000-strong crowd who gathered in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo earlier this month might have been smaller than Erdogan is now used to, but their dedication made up for their numbers. Most had come from Western Europe, Turks from Germany, the Netherlands

Two video clips did the rounds in the French media at the weekend. One went global, that of the heart-warming heroism of Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant who rescued a small boy dangling from a balcony in Paris; the other, being more feel-fear than feel-good, didn’t capture the world’s attention in quite the same way. This film was shot in the south of France, in a suburb of Avignon, and showed a group of men surrounding a newspaper kiosk. They were there to protest at a large poster advertising the latest edition of the current affairs magazine, Le Point, the front cover of which was adorned with a photograph of the Turkish president

Istanbul It is a bad time to have an ally on the fence. With US military action in Syria looking more likely by the minute, and the West’s frosty relations with Russia in danger of deepening into a new Cold War, Washington is eyeing the actions of Turkey’s President Erdogan with concern. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the ally with the second biggest army and the only one to share a border with Syria, has spent the past two years cosying up to Russia. Ankara is part of the Astana troika alongside Moscow and Tehran – an initiative that has snatched the peace-broking lead in Syria from the UN

If there is a place in Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the swaggering six-foot president, looks small it is at the tomb of the nation’s founder. Anitkabir, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s mausoleum, spreads over 185 acres in the heart of the capital Ankara. It is a monument to nationalism, towering modernism and the man who dismantled the Ottoman Empire and then rebuilt it as a nation state. Erdogan has made little secret of his distaste for elements of Ataturk’s project – particularly its staunch secularism – since he first rose to political prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s. Yet since 2003, as prime minister and then president, he has been

It took only a few hours for hope to turn to fresh despair. At lunchtime on Friday, the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel was freed after more than a year in detention. An image of Yucel embracing his wife – who he had married while he was incarcerated – outside the concrete and razor-wire gates of Istanbul’s Silivri prison raced across social media, to widespread jubilation. But by the time the day’s evening call-to-prayer sounded, six other journalists had been convicted and jailed, three of them with aggravated life sentences. All have been accused of supporting terrorist groups, either the Kurdish militants of the PKK or the Gulenists, the Islamic sect

Turkey’s top religious body has issued a new fatwa, saying that ‘every pious Muslim must only use their right hand to eat and drink’ – because, apparently, only demons are left-handed. While it may seem like that line has been lifted directly from a medieval text, when southpaws were routinely accused of consorting with the devil, it hasn’t. The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, known as the Diyanet, has qualified its new ruling based on some traditional teachings including, it says, because ‘the Prophet Muhammed did not regard eating with the left hand as pleasant’. It also says the Prophet warned ‘demons eat and drink with their left hand’. It

Something has changed in the way we cover Syria. In 2015, Turkey began building a wall along the length of its 550-mile frontier with the war zone. The reasons were valid: Turkey wanted to cut the jihadi highway through which tens of thousands of foreigners had travelled into Syria and joined up with Isis. It also wanted to stop them travelling back the other way. The wall is now almost finished. It is three metres high, made of reinforced concrete topped with razor wire, and mounted with security cameras and automated guns. The area around the wall is heavy with soldiers and parts are periodically declared restricted military zones –

 Beirut ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense,’ said Alice. ‘Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?’ For the United States, and for the rest of us, Lewis Carroll is as good a guide as any to what is happening in northern Syria right now. Turkey — America’s Nato ally — has sent tanks rolling across the border to attack the Kurds, America’s ally against Isis. Thus the United States finds itself supporting both sides in the same war. You see? Some

What, you might well ask, could possibly make the situation in Syria look much worse, after President Erdogan’s assault on the Kurds in Afrin? The Turks are, obviously, attacking the forces that did most of the heavy lifting when it came to dealing with Isis on the ground. Indeed, If it hadn’t been for the Kurds, it’s at least arguable that Isis would still be sitting tight in Raqqa rather than dispersed elsewhere. They are the only really reliable ally in the area for the US – though I take on board the argument that it was the US’s move in establishing a force of 30,000 border guards, dominated by

Turkey’s decision to send troops into Syria to fight the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has seen how the country is changing over the past few months. Turkey has become increasingly determined to forge its own way in the world, ignoring the entreaties of western countries, and indeed blaming the West for many of its troubles. The Erdogan government says the YPG is a terrorist organisation that, along with the PKK, is determined to do Turkey harm. When I visited Istanbul, Gaziantep and Izmir in December, the most striking thing about my meetings with political figures and members of civil society was

Istanbul President Erdogan has spent much of this year slinging muck at Europe’s heads of state, and he has damaged a number of already precarious relationships. Now it looks as if he is about to come up against the force of US diplomacy and Turkey may find itself in trouble. Turkey and the US have been Nato allies since 1952. During that time, Turkey has played up its strategic position for military bases close to the Middle East. In turn, the US has downplayed a number of disputes between the two countries, particularly in recent years as the conflict in Syria has raged on. Even as they seemed to be

A hundred years after the Russian revolution, Russia has a tsar and a court. Proximity to Putin is the key to wealth, office and survival. The outward signs of a court society have returned: double-headed eagles, the imperial coat of arms, the cult of Nicholas II (one of whose recently erected statues has ‘wept tears’), an increasingly wealthy and subservient Orthodox Church. In 2013, ‘to strengthen the historical continuity of the Russian armed forces’, the main honour guard regiment in Moscow was renamed Preobrazhensky, after the oldest regiment of the Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great in 1683. A statue of St Vladimir, founder and Christianiser of the Russian