Stories from Turkey Ahval

Ahval journalist John Lubbock talks to Ryan Gingeras, author of the book 'Heroin, organized crime and the making of modern Turkey' about the recent release of mafia boss Alaattin Çakıcı.

EUME fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Yektan Türkyılmaz, discusses the Idlib attack, in which 36 Turkish troops were killed with AhvalPod and suggests that the Erdoğan’s government is turning into a war regime with its current foreign policy vision.

Turkey and its allies are facing a difficult situation in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib, particularly after the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad seized the control of Saraqib in eastern Idlib countryside this week, said Timur Göksel, former spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

Turkish human rights advocate Şebnem Korur Fincancı shared with Ahval her reflections on last week's United Nations periodic review of Turkey, which focused on the country's human rights violations including the use of torture.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had a tough 2019. He had to deal with rising food prices, losing local elections in his political strong hold of Istanbul, power that opposed his ambitions to build a safe zone in north Syria and even scientists who fail to understand the simplicity of calculating salinity levels of the sea.
As the year ends, Hale Akay and Michael MacKenzie discuss the president’s last 12 months through his public remarks and try to understand why Erdoğan said what he did.

Birol Başkan, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute whose research broadly focuses on religion and political order in the Middle East, spoke to Ahval about how Islamism has incorporated nationalism in Turkey and the characteristics of the country’s “religious market”.