They were celebrating the 15th-century conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, the golden moment of Turkey’s Muslim ancestors triumphing over the Christian West.
.. Where Mr. Erdogan once held up Turkey as a model of Muslim democracy, he now frequently attacks democratic institutions.
.. The editor in chief of Turkey’s largest daily has fled the country, and another is on trial on charges of revealing state secrets. The president has grown intolerant of criticism, purging his oldest allies from his inner circle and replacing them with yes men and, in some cases, relatives.
.. Mr. Erdogan hints darkly in near-daily speeches on Turkish television that foreign powers are plotting to destroy him
.. Now he has set his sights on a new target: transforming Turkey’s parliamentary system of government into a presidential one, a change his critics say could soon open the door to his seizing the title of president for life.
.. the Parliament, which his party controls, worked until 5:45 a.m. to pass sweeping legislation that will help pave the way by purging hundreds of judges from Turkey’s top two courts.
.. Mr. Erdogan, 62, is one of the most talented politicians Turkey has ever known
.. his critics — and even some of his admirers — say he became so absorbed in battling his enemies, both real and perceived, that he lost his way.
.. Even a former friend, who like others feared being identified, said he had known Mr. Erdogan for 40 years, but no longer recognized him.
..To gain control of Turkey’s bureaucracy, Mr. Erdogan struck an alliance with an opaque religious group led by a Muslim preacher, Fethullah Gulen, filling the ranks of the police and the judiciary with its highly educated members...As Mr. Erdogan grew more popular, winning broad pluralities and even majorities in each successive election, he began to behave with a kind of Bolshevism, believing that he was the very embodiment of the people, former officials said...Others argue that Turkey’s problems are as much about the country as they are about Mr. Erdogan... even though we have the hardware of democracy — institutions, elections — our software is not good. We are too attuned to status, too willing to submit to authority.”
President of Turkey Urges Resistance as Military Attempts Coup
Leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, also spoke out against a seizure of government by the military.
“This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials C.H.P., said in a written statement, according to Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C.H.P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy.”
.. Mr. Erdogan blamed followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an ally before the two had a bitter falling-out in 2013 over a corruption inquiry that targeted Mr. Erdogan and his inner circle, for the coup attempt.
.. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, the military has staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and intervened in 1997. The military had long seen itself as the guardian of the secular system
.. Mr. Erdogan attracted a wide-ranging constituency in the early years of his tenure, including many liberals who supported his plans to reform the economy and remove the military from politics. But in recent years he has alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic ways, cracking down on freedom of expression, imposing a significant role for religion in public life and renewing war with Kurdish militants in the country’s southeast.
.. “The people tried to stand up against President Erdogan, but they couldn’t, they were crushed, so the military had no choice but to take over,” said Cem Yildiz, a taxi driver.
When the Necessary Is Impossible
Crushing the Islamic State, or ISIS, is necessary for stabilizing Iraq and Syria, but it is impossible as long as Shiites and Sunnis there refuse to truly share power, and yet ignoring the ISIS cancer and its ability to metastasize is impossible as well. See: Belgium.
.. our trying to make Iraq safe for democracy is requiring us to turn a blind eye to the fact that our most important NATO “ally” in the region, Turkey, is being converted from a democracy into a dictatorship by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who should now be called “Sultan Erdogan” for the way he is closing opposition newspapers and putting journalists on trial. But because we need Turkey’s air bases and cooperation to foster a modicum of democracy in Iraq tomorrow, we are silent on Erdogan destroying democracy in Turkey today.
.. “The problem in Iraq is not ISIS,” Najmaldin Karim, the wise governor of Kirkuk Province, which is partly occupied by ISIS, remarked to me. “ISIS is the symptom of mismanagement and sectarianism.” So even if ISIS is evicted from its stronghold in Mosul, he noted, if the infighting and mismanagement in Baghdad and sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are not diffused, “the situation in Iraq could be even worse after” ISIS is toppled.
Why? Because there will just be another huge scramble among Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens, Shiite militias, Turkey and Iran over who controls these territories now held by ISIS.
.. So if one day you hear that we’ve eliminated the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and lowered the ISIS flag over Mosul, hold your applause.
.. a vast majority of the people in Kirkuk Province who have come to fight with ISIS were local Sunnis, who saw ISIS as a force protecting them from the pro-Iranian Shiite government in Baghdad. Or, they were more impoverished Sunnis who saw joining ISIS as a way of gaining power over wealthier, upper-class Sunnis.
.. As long as Iran and Saudi Arabia are going at it, there will always be another ISIS.
.. Only Arabs and Muslims can truly take down and delegitimize ISIS and right now their village is too divided, angry, ambivalent and confused to do it.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Despotic Zeal
THE virtual control he already has of a majority ofTurkey’s newspapers and TV stations apparently isn’t enough for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On Friday, with the zeal of its despotic leader, his government seized my paper, Today’s Zaman, and its parent, the Turkish-language Zaman, which is the highest-circulating daily in the country. Together, these titles were two of the few remaining independent voices inside Turkey — and Today’s Zaman, in particular, was a reliable English-language news source for diplomats, academics and expatriates.
On Friday, a government-controlled court appointed trustees to take over the newspapers in what amounts to a politically motivated assault. At midnight, protesters faced tear gas and water cannons as riot police stormed our Istanbul headquarters.
The authorities used power tools to force open the iron gate to the building. The following day, our Internet connection was cut off to stop staff members from working on a special edition about the takeover. Since then, the authorities have been unplugging the newspapers’ servers, destroying our digital archive.