On the 1st January 2009, 25 people were killed in a suicide bombing in the town of Yusufiya south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, reported Turkmeneli TV.
 
About 67 Turkmen Qaragol tribes were also injured in the attack at a gathering of Turkmen Qaragol tribal leaders in Yusufiya, 20km (12 miles) from Baghdad. The Qaragoli [...]

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http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/domestic/10659207.asp

ANKARA - As Turkey’s first full-time Kurdish TV Channel, TRT-6, is about to be launched, bans remain on the use of letters in the Kurdish alphabet such as w, q, and x, which are absent in the Turkish language.
The head of the Kurdish Writers’ Association, Ýrfan Babaoðlu, dismissed the channel [...]

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http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/story/2008/12/16/turkey-petition.html?ref=rss
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 | 3:24 PM ET Comments8Recommend26
CBC News

A group of 200 Turkish intellectuals is tackling one of the great taboos of Turkish society — the 1916 massacres of Armenians in the country.
A group of writers, journalists and academics, many of them prominent members in their fields, has posted [...]

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Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 5 Issue: 238
December 15, 2008
By: Saban Kardas
The attempts to resolve Turkey’s Kurdish problem have focused increasingly on Iraq. Turkey has stepped up its diplomatic contacts with both the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to boost its fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), based in Northern [...]

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As Britain prepares to pull its troops out of Iraq, former BBC Baghdad correspondent Andrew North looks back to a previous military campaign and considers whether history is destined to repeat itself?
As the insurgency spread, the letters from the British diplomat in Baghdad grew bleaker.
“We are in the [...]

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By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 10, 2008, 00:22
(WMR) — Tuncay Guney, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) agent who was a key player in the right-wing “Deep State” Ergenekon movement that attempted to overthrow the Turkish government, spent time in North Jersey in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, according to a reliable [...]

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By Samanthi Dissanayake
BBC News

While Gurdal Yuce was growing up in a Kurdish pocket of Haringey, north London, his two older brothers were fighting for a Kurdish homeland in south-eastern Turkey.
They spent their formative years in Britain, but in the early 1990s they opted for a militant’s life in the inhospitable [...]

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A democratic Turkey that has respect in Muslim capitals is exactly what the West needs.
By Mustafa Akyol | NEWSWEEK
Published Dec 6, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008
For years Ankara’s foreign policy was fixated on a few narrow topics—how to handle the Greeks, the Kurds and Armenians—and Turkish policymakers seemed unable to solve even these [...]

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Ramday Javed Iqbal (lead)
Alistair Corbett
October 2008

http://www.da.mod.uk/colleges/rcds/CollegeNews/papers/CSI%20Turkey.pdf
 
The Royal College of Defence Studies

RCDS 2008 – CONTEMPORARY STRATEGIC ISSUES

Key Judgements

• Turkey is likely to internally consolidate its democracy, resolve conflict between secularism and political Islam and sustain economic growth. Some tension between democratic forces and secular elite will remain.
 
• The Kurdish problem [...]

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Turkey’s PKK Responds to AKP Flirtation with the Kurdistan Regional Government
Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 23
December 8, 2008 03:25 PM Age: 44 min
Category: Terrorism Monitor, Global Terrorism Analysis, Terrorism, Turkey
By: NIhat Ali Ozcan and Saban Kardas
Turkey had high hopes its cross-border operations in the winter of 2007-8 would eliminate the threat posed by the [...]

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