Islamist threat to Turkey’s secular system

Turkish secularism on the ropes. Sharia is advancing in what is always held out to be that exemplary beacon of democracy in the Islamic world, Turkey. The reasons why Sharia supremacists are advancing there have not — unsurprisingly — been sufficiently explored by Western analysts, who of course dismiss out of hand the appeal of a call to restore Islamic authenticity.

“Erdogan Set for Election Win That May Revive Tension Over Islam,” by Ben Holland for Bloomberg, March 27

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to win a fresh mandate from voters that may embolden his challenge to the country’s military and courts, which see him as an Islamist threat to Turkey’s secular system.

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Turk Arrested Over Kurds’ Killings in ’90s

A Turkish officer was arrested Wednesday in connection with suspected extrajudicial killings in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast in the 1990s.

A court in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, issued the arrest warrant for the officer, Col. Cemal Temizoz, pending a trial.

Colonel Temizoz served near the town of Cizre, about 40 miles from the Iraqi border in Turkey’s southeast, between 1993 and 1996, when hundreds of Kurdish civilians and activists were said to have been killed by security forces with links to the military.

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Turkey attacks Kurd rebel targets in northern Iraq

Turkish warplanes struck Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq on Thursday, state-run news agency Anatolian reported a military official as saying on Friday.

Turkey’s military has waged offensives both in Turkish territory and across the border in northern Iraq against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

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Attack on Baghdad police kills 28

A suicide bomber has killed 28 people at a police recruitment centre in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, police say.

At least 57 other people were wounded in the attack, which was reported to have been carried out by a bomber who drove his motorcycle into a crowd.

The victims were queuing outside the academy when the bomber struck.

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Bomb kills 10 in Baghdad

A car bomb exploded Thursday in a crowded livestock market selling sheep, cattle and goats south of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens, Iraqi police and medical officials said.

The parked car exploded at the height of the morning buying and selling at the market on the outskirts of Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, said Iraqi police Maj. Muthana Khalid. The blast scattered bodies and animal carcasses throughout the market, a witness said.

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Iraq and Afghanistan: Tough balancing act for Obama

Stephen Biddle, a senior defense and counterterrorism analyst, says that President Obama’s schedule for reducing and then ending the U.S. deployment in Iraq “is a reasonable compromise between several conflicting demands.” Biddle argues that to keep the peace in these difficult political times in Iraq, more and not less U.S. forces are needed. Even though it is important to boost the force level in Afghanistan, he believes it is not so crucial to do it now.

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More death sentence for Chemical Ali

Ali Hassan al-Majid, a former official in Saddam Hussein’s regime who was known as “Chemical Ali”, has been given his third death sentence.

He was sentenced along with several other former officials over the 1999 killings of Shia Muslims in Baghdad.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was acquitted by the Iraqi court.

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Suicide bomber hits in Iraq

A suicide bomb attack on the family of anti-insurgent tribal leader has left one person dead near Fallujah on Sunday afternoon, a police official said.

The official said the blast killed the son of Sheik Khalid al-Eifan, whose clan had joined the uprising against al-Qaida in Iraq in the western province of Anbar.

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Iran has enough nuclear fuel to make bomb

The United States believes Iran has stockpiled enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said on Sunday.

“We think they do, quite frankly,” Mullen said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program when asked whether Iran has enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

“And Iran having nuclear weapons, I’ve believed for a long time, is a very very bad outcome — for the region and for the world,” Mullen said.

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Kurdish ‘grave sites’ to be dug

A Turkish prosecutor has ordered the digging up of several sites where it is believed the bodies of Kurds killed in the 1990s may have been dumped.

Hundreds of people disappeared at the height of the fighting in the mainly Kurdish south-east.

Human rights lawyers say many were last seen with security forces members.

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