Turkey

Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has been dissected by the world’s press, perhaps none more so than in Turkey, where the journalist met his grisly fate. Fresh information is still being leaked about his final moments inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. In a recording of his murder, Khashoggi can be heard putting up a fight. He orders his killers to release him and warns they’ll be brought to account. But will they? Or are there bigger fish to fry? And what is Erdogan hoping to achieve by making life uncomfortable for Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Khashoggi has been described by some as a Saudi dissident. Turkish media say he

 Istanbul In another time, in another place, we might never have known about the death of Jamal Khashoggi. In a Saudi consulate, the staff are guaranteed to say nothing. The reason we know so much is that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been willing to tell the world not just what he knows, but what he suspects. It has been clear from the offset that this isn’t just about the death of a journalist but a battle for political leadership of the Islamic world. On Tuesday, in his first full statement on Khashoggi’s killing, Erdogan said that the perpetrators should stand trial in Turkey, and that everyone

The morning after Mesut Özil’s shock resignation from the German national football team, his family’s ancestral home set to work. Enlisting the help of the local fire brigade, locals in Devrek, a small village near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, removed the large board at its entrance of the star midfielder in his Germany kit. The picture chosen as its replacement was a giant version of the image that first caused the furore – a photograph of Özil shaking hands with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The response of this small village was far from unique in Turkey. Özil’s resignation has played out very differently here to how it has in Germany.

Many people I know woke up yesterday morning with a knot in their stomachs. ‘Another five years,’ I heard one person mutter. They were referring of course to the victory secured by President Erdogan in Turkey. He won nearly 53 per cent of the votes in an election that many had hoped would see him defeated, especially as his regular ‘Ace’ card, the economy, has been rather rocky these past few years. The result showed his main rival wasn’t even close: Muharrem Ince garnered a little shy of 31 per cent in the poll. The 64-year-old president thanked the country for putting their faith in him once again. He told

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 –