A train Turkish journalists arrested, allegedly in full compliance with the law? Who doubts? In the same obnoxious ideas circulating in the corridors of the Turkish courts include our friend Erol Özkoray worried for statements in his book Gezi phenomenon that could earn him 18 months in prison. In an interview with France Culture, the writer is concerned about the future of Turkey under Erdogan
Syrian rebels, local govt. agree to truce in Homs
Activists say Syrian rebels and local government officials have agreed to a truce in the last opposition-held area of the central city of Homs, according to the Associated Press.
Activist Beibars al-Tilawi said the 10-day truce beginning Thursday, Jan 15, will allow more food to enter the al-Waar area. He says it will also provide time to negotiate a more lasting resolution to the 20-month standoff in al-Waar, which has been besieged by government forces.
Al-Tilawi said rebels sought the truce to alleviate the suffering of civilians, and because they were outgunned by government forces.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported the truce.
19,000 French websites suffer cyberattacks since last week
In what France’s cyberdefense chief calls an unprecedented surge, about 19,000 French websites have suffered cyberattacks since a rampage by Islamic extremists in Paris last week, the Associated Press reports.
Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere told reporters Thursday, Jan 15, that many of the cyberattacks were carried out by “more or less structured” groups, including some well-known Islamic hacker groups.
“That’s never been seen before. It’s the first time that a country has been faced with such a large wave,” he said.
The attacks, which appear to have involved mostly relatively minor denial-of-service attacks, have hit sites as varied as military regiments to pizza shops, he said.
French President Francois Hollande, meanwhile, insisted that any anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic acts must be “severely punished,” as he sought to calm rising religious tensions after his country’s bloodiest terrorist attacks in decades.
The country is tense since 20 people, including three gunmen, were killed in last week’s rampage that began at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, which been repeatedly threatened for caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was burying several staff members Thursday of the 12 that were killed.
Two of the Paris terror attackers claimed allegiances to al-Qaida in Yemen, and another — who targeted a kosher supermarket — to the Islamic State group.
The attacks occurred in an atmosphere of rising anti-Semitism in France, and have prompted scattered attacks on Muslim sites around France in an apparent backlash. They have also put many French Muslims on the defensive.
Hollande said France’s millions of Muslims should be protected and respected, “just as they themselves should respect the nation” and its strictly secular values.
“Anti-Muslim acts, like anti-Semitism, should not just be denounced but severely punished,” Hollande said Thursday at the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, according to the AP.
Noting that Muslims are the main victims of Islamic extremist violence, he said, “In the face of terrorism, we are all united.”
With 120,000 security forces deployed to prevent future attacks, nerves jumped overnight when a car rammed into a policewoman guarding the president’s palace. The incident at the Elysee Palace had no apparent links to last week’s shootings and might have been an accident, prosecutors and police said.
The car carrying four people took a one-way street in the wrong direction then drove off when the police officer tried to stop them. The officer sustained slight leg injuries, police said. Two people were later arrested, and two others in the car fled.
U.S. and French intelligence officials are leaning toward an assessment that the Paris terror attacks were inspired by al-Qaida but not directly supervised by the group, a view that would put the violence in a category of homegrown incidents that are extremely difficult to detect and thwart.
French justice officials have been cracking down by arresting dozens of people who glorified terrorism or made racist or anti-Semitic remarks.
Customers lined up again Thursday to try to get copies of Charlie Hebdo’s first edition since the attacks, which again had Muhammad on the cover. Even though it has a special increased print run of 5 million copies, it sold out before dawn Thursday in Paris kiosks for a second day straight.
Muslims believe their faith forbids depictions of the prophet, and some reacted with dismay — and occasional anger — to the new cover. Some who had supported Charlie Hebdo after the attacks felt betrayed and others feared the cartoon would trigger yet more violence.
A leader of Yemen’s al-Qaida branch officially claimed responsibility for the attacks by the two gunmen at Charlie Hebdo, saying in a video posted online that the slayings were in “vengeance for the prophet.”
Gyumri bids final farewell to slain Avetisyan family
GYUMRI. – On Thursday, the residents of Armenia’s Gyumri city are bidding their last goodbye to six members of the Avetisyan family who were brutally murdered on Monday.
The people in attendance are so much that there is a large queue at the entrance of the church where the memorial service is offered, and it is virtually impossible to enter, informed the Armenian News-NEWS.am reporter in Armenia’s second largest city.
The burial service for the slain Avetisyan family members is slated to get underway at 2pm.
A large number of police forces are on duty in the area.
Six members of the Avetisyan family—including a two-year-old girl—were shot dead, and a six-month-old baby boy was wounded in their house in Gyumri on Monday. Valery Permyakov, a serviceman of the 102nd Russian Military Base in the city, stands accused in this crime. Permyakov was apprehended by the Russian border guards near the Armenian-Turkish border, and he was arrested on Wednesday. It was decided that the Russian side will be investigating the case involving this soldier.
Turkey’s dirty secret about al-Qaeda
Since 2012, political observers has been questioning Turkey’s relationship with al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist terrorist organizations.
Three interesting developments related to this took place in last 10 days. First, a suicide bomber attacked the İstanbul police. It was revealed that the suicide attacker came from Russia and is affiliated with an Islamic terrorist organization. Interestingly enough, the Turkish police, for the first time in its history, did not reveal the name of the terrorist organization. Three people were arrested for their connection to the attack, but no one knows who they are and what terrorist organizations they belong to.
Those who know how the police work and how counter-terrorism operations are conducted easily noticed that a suicide attack is not a typical terrorist attack. If it was a typical terrorist attack, police would have revealed the name of the organization, shared further evidence, etc. Instead of revealing the truth behind the attack, the police tried to cover up the real story behind the attack.
More importantly, the Turkish media, too, ignored the attack and acts as if no attack took place in İstanbul. We all know from the Uludere incident in which 34 Kurdish villagers were killed by Turkish warplanes, when the Turkish media ignores a terror-related incident, one needs to know Ankara doesn’t want them to investigate the incident.
All in all, the suicide attack in İstanbul seems to be related to the Turkish intelligence community, not to a typical terrorist attack.
Secondly, an anonymous Twitter user claiming to be part of a leftist group shared some documents about Turkey’s assistance to al-Qaeda. The documents indicate that Turkey was transferring weapons to al-Qaeda organizations inside Syria. The documents show that the trucks stopped by gendarmes were full of Russian weapons and heading to al-Qaeda militants inside Syria.
Soon after the documents were leaked on Twitter, Turkish authorities stepped up and got court orders to shut down Twitter and other websites that posted the documents. Such attempts indicate that the documents showed the dirty secret of the Turkish government and made it unhappy.
The weapon transfer to al-Qaeda was much-debated by the Turkish public but for the first time documents prove the allegations about these bizarre relations. Turkish authorities, instead of denying the allegations and proving that they did not help al-Qaeda, tried to cover up the story by attempting to shut down Twitter and other websites that published the document.
Third and more importantly, a witness revealing the dirty secrets of Turkey came out this week. Onder Sığırcıklıoğlu, a former National Intelligence Organization (MİT) agent who was assigned to coordinate anti-Assad activities in Hatay, spoke out about his activities. While working for MİT, Sığırcıklıoğlu organized the handing over of the Syrian colonel Huseyin Hormoush to Assad’s forces.
Sığırcıklıoğlu claims that he has witnessed many illegal activates, including helping illegal groups, transferring arms from Libya to al-Qaeda and bringing jihadists from abroad to Syria.
It is interesting to note that UN inspectors were investigating allegations that the Turkish state was transferring arms from Libya to al-Qaeda; now a former MİT agent speaks out about it.
The documents that show that the Russian weapon systems being transferred into Syria must be related to those weapons brought from Libya.
Seeing all three incidents in the same week is unusual. It seems that there is a serious battle going on behind the curtain; certainly one side of the battle is Turkish intelligence community, but we don’t know the other side.
It could be a sign of rivalry within the state apparatus as well as rivalry between Turkey and other countries.
No matter what the real reason is, revealing Turkey’s dirty secret about al-Qaeda the week of the terrorist attacks in Paris shows that Turkey will face a difficult time for its support to al-Qaeda.
‘Davutoğlu, the AKP and the pursuit of regional order’
William ARMSTRONG – william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
‘Turkey’s New Foreign Policy: Davutoğlu, the AKP and the Pursuit of Regional Order’ by Aaron Stein (Routledge, 105 pages, $42)
It’s just as well to state at the outset that this slim new volume on Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East immediately becomes the new standard bearer on the subject. In it, author Aaron Stein describes how Ankara’s regional policy over the last decade has undergone a dramatic shift, overseen by current Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former foreign minister and adviser to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Examining the worldview expressed in Davutoğlu’s much vaunted academic writings, and how this has (or has not) been applied since 2002, the book argues that Turkey’s support for change in the region in recent years is highly conditional. The government is convinced of its principled righteousness, but its policy is also based on calculations aimed at furthering a particular AKP-centered understanding of Turkey’s national interests. Although a longer text could have extended the range across a broader set of examples, Stein – an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute – makes a convincing case in little over 100 pages.
With a few exceptions, the Turkish Republic’s regional policy after its foundation as a separate state in 1923 was defined by its preference for non-intervention and neutrality in the areas that had formed part of the Ottoman Empire. This was based on the mantra of first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, “peace at home, peace in the world” – risk-aversion seemed to be the most logical foreign policy when nation-building at home was the priority. However, the AKP marked a sharp change of course after coming to power in 2002, with Davutoğlu adopting a proactive foreign policy aimed at expanding Turkey’s zone of influence in the Middle East. In his 2001 book “Strategic Depth” (which had its 100th print run last year), the former professor articulated a vision drawing on Turkey’s geography, economic power and imperial history to reconnect with its historical “hinterland” in the former Ottoman territories. For Davutoğlu, previous Turkish decision making was flawed because it was based on a shallow interpretation of Turkey’s geography and history. In contrast, he believes that post-Cold War Turkey has “a unique opportunity to expand its influence and create strategic depth” as a “center state.”
Among the prime minister’s acolytes, there is a sense that Turkey’s republican non-intervention in the region is essentially an oppressive Western imposition of the 20th century, coming after the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment by the European powers. This interpretation of geopolitics “is based on an assumption that the spread of Western power into the Balkans, Central Asia and the Middle East is incongruent with Turkish national interests and must be reversed.” Stein suggests that Davutoğlu draws on pan-Islamism as a source of communal strength and political legitimacy, repeatedly referring to the concepts of “Tawhid” (the oneness of God) and “Tanzih” (the purity of God) in his writings. This is combined with inspiration from a number of almost-forgotten German geopolitical theorists from over a century ago, and the result is a fundamental rejection of the current world order. Davutoğlu believes that if Turkey establishes itself as a global power it will be able to “play a significant role in creating new global institutions that are more in keeping with the world’s different ‘civilisations’ or cultures.”
Nevertheless, the AKP’s foreign policy implementation from 2002-2011 proved to be highly pragmatic. Ankara formed alliances with a number of status quo-favoring autocrats, seeking to bolster its influence with neighboring regimes and boost economic ties by lifting visa restrictions and emphasizing common culture and history. As Stein writes, this much vaunted “zero problems with neighbors” strategy was based more on realpolitik than Davutoğlu’s concept of strategic depth, but it was “largely guided by [Ankara’s] expectation that, eventually, this status quo would be swept away as governments more representative of the masses came to power across the region.” The AKP therefore opted to focus on areas that would deepen its influence, maneuvering itself into a strong position as it anticipated the eventual demise of the Arab world’s political order.
However, when protests in its Arab neighbors broke out in late 2010, Turkey was taken by surprise. Its initial policies were as cautious as the rest of the world, and varied across different countries, but over time Ankara began to fully incorporate elements of Davutoğlu’s “strategic depth” in response to the rapid changes. After nearly a decade wedded to realpolitik, the AKP eventually came to feel that the Arab upheavals had provided the opportunity to create a new regional order with Turkey at the center. In Stein’s words, “This understanding of regional affairs was based on the belief that the era of European-inspired political and ethnic nationalism was a historical anachronism in the Middle East – destined to fail and be replaced with governments more representative of the ‘Muslim masses.’” For Davutoğlu, those governments that adopted Western constructs will be “replaced by more representative governments that embrace Tawhid as the source of their political legitimacy.”
In practice, this meant backing Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated parties across the Arab world. The second part of the book offers case studies of Ankara’s policy toward a number of key states before and after the Arab Spring – including Egypt, Syria, Libya and Tunisia – where the details differ greatly but the essential similarity has been Ankara’s support for the Brotherhood. In places where the opposition forces are not Sunni groups affiliated with the Brotherhood, Turkey has shown little interest.
The limits of this approach have since become apparent. Although Turkey could credibly present itself as a neutral actor in the region seeking to strike accommodations with varied political groups from 2002 to 2011, it has since been perceived as an outside actor pushing a particular agenda via the democratic process. In Stein’s account, “the AKP’s policy towards the Arab upheavals therefore cannot be described as an effort to promote democracy or to stand by the people against state oppression. Instead, it has been far more nuanced, based on assumptions made about a changing regional order and how the upending of the Arab world’s political status quo would benefit the AKP.” Erdoğan’s repeated waving of the four-fingered Rabia sign at electoral rallies may be sincerely felt, but it is also highly opportunistic.
The Turkish government has tied its foreign policy to the success of one particular political group, but putting all its eggs into the Brotherhood basket has ultimately limited its influence. Today, the trajectory of Middle Eastern politics places Ankara at odds with many of its neighbors. Turkey finds itself with little influence at a time when many of the region’s conflicts touch directly on its core interests – a situation spun memorably last year by Davutoğlu’s political advisor İbrahim Kalın as “precious isolation.” Stein writes that no major changes should be expected in the foreseeable future. Despite their regional marginalization, Turkish policymakers have doubled down and remain committed to their post-2011 foreign policy. The AKP believes that it is playing the long game and its “principled” foreign policy decisions will ultimately pay off once regional countries inevitably return to electoral politics and the pressure for political change begins anew. Time will tell.
January/15/2015
The most outrageous salary Iraq: Massoud Barzani Salary $400,00, per month,
The question is where do Barzani deposit his salary in Kurdistan or at Erdogan Bank?
BAGHDAD,— Iraqi President and his deputies’ monthly salaries amount reach 269 million dinars (roughly $ 235,500) Iraqi MP for the Coalition of State Law, Awatif Naima said on Tuesday, indicating that this amount represents a waste of public money, Iraqinews reported.
”President Fuad Masum receives 80 million dinars ($ 70,000) as a monthly salary,” pointing out that, “All three of the Vice President of the Republic receive 63 million dinars as a monthly salary.” Naima said.
“The salaries of Masum and his deputies represent a waste of public money, particularly as we live in a critical economic crisis due to the drop in oil price,” she said, calling for “reducing the salaries of the three presidencies and those with high status into half to avoid the shortfall to the general budget.”
Kurdish magazine (Levin) reported in 2010, remuneration and the monthly salary of Massoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq’s north is $400,000 dollars per month.
This amount is equivalent to the salary and allowances of Barack Obama President of the USA for a full year, because Obama is the salary ($ 33,333) dollars and only equal to ($400,000) dollars a year. The Kurdistan region budget not to exceed 8 billion dollars a year in return that the annual budget for the United States is ($14,264) trillion dollars.
Former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani monthly salary was 75 million Iraqi dinars, which make 900 million dinars (roughly $700,000) annually,
Need to be mentioned that a medical source in Erbil revealed in 2014 that the cost of treating Iraqi President Jalal Talabani amounted to $150 million USD from Iraq’s budget. The source said, in a statement to Iraqi News that “Talabani’s medical expenses during the first six months in Germany amounted to $120 million USD, indicating that he was transferred later to another place. The expenses spent on taking care of him were estimated at $30 million US dollars.”
Azerbaijan Crime: A Baku Pogrom Eyewitness Recounts the Ordeal 25 Years Later
EDITOR’S NOTE: Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte has spent the better part of her adult life speaking about the horrors of Azerbaijani state-sponsored pogroms against the Armenian population in Baku, which commenced on January 13, 1990—25 years ago today—and saw the forced deportation and gruesome murder of Armenians who had called Baku home for generations. What makes her qualified is that she and her family escaped the atrocities and she lived to tell the world. She has spoken about this tragic incident in recent Armenian history at State Houses, as well as Congress. In September, 2014, Astvatsaturian Turcotte accompanied her father, Norik, to his first-ever visit to Armenia and Artsakh since the Baku pogroms. On the 25th anniversary of the tragic events in Baku, Astvatsaturian Turcotte has allowed Asbarez the exclusive right to publish below an excerpt of her book, “Nowhere, a Story of Exile – a childhood diary of Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte.”
BY ANNA ASTVATSATURIAN TURCOTTE
“One evening, she said, during the [Baku] riots and demonstrations, a group of five to seven young men came into the patio and directly went up to Vilya’s apartment on the second floor. They had batons in their hands. These batons were infamous for instantly breaking a bone. Some of the men carried other dangerous objects, like knives and clubs.
The men broke into Vilya’s apartment and beat Vilya’s grandmother in their hallway. This happened during evening hours and Vilya was there to witness the violence. Grandma couldn’t tell us if he himself was hurt. They didn’t touch his mother, Zhanna, who was the daughter of an Azeri father, making her an Azeri. But they did beat her sixty five year-old mother in front of her. No one had ever heard such horrifying screams like the ones that came from Zhanna’s throat when she pleaded for them to stop beating her already unconscious, old mother. Zhanna screamed and tore off her long hair, and the men were holding her back as their friends beat an old woman. But they didn’t stop.
The thugs left very suddenly – when Zhanna died. Her death was surprising and instant. A heart attack killed her. Her heart literally broke. Her mother, Lilya, was injured but alive. Zhanna, an eccentric, yet beautiful woman in her mid 30s, with long black hair and big passionate dark eyes, was dead.
The apartment was left the way it was when Zhanna died; the shock of her death was astonishing to even the thugs. They ran off without touching a thing. There were valuable objects in her apartment, more expensive than anyone’s in our building. Rahiba and a Russian neighbor, Katya, said that they’ll look after it. Instead, over several nights, they robbed the place clean of everything Zhanna possessed.
We didn’t doubt for a second that Rahiba had informed on Zhanna and her family just for the expensive things in their comfortable apartment. It wasn’t only about religion, or nationality or a piece of good real estate called Karabakh. It wasn’t about the pride and honor of the country, or a sense of national supremacy. This tornado of events brought up the dirt and the slime of humanity to the surface, and at the end we didn’t suffer just for being Armenian. We suffered equally for having the best apartments, the most beautiful Czechoslovakian crystal, gold jewelry, precious gems, china, hand-blown German New Year Tree decorations, valuable furniture and silver forks and knives.”
Excerpt from “Nowhere, a Story of Exile – a childhood diary of Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte.”
Rereading these words I wrote as a child brings a nauseating, dark feeling of imminent danger. This familiar feeling, triggered by memories, comes and goes in forms of health problems, flashbacks, bouts of sobbing or nightmares over the last 25 years. This sick feeling is a lifelong companion to many survivors of the Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan, close to 400,000 of us. Every autumn, with every first snow I am instantly taken back in time to my first few months in Yerevan as an Armenian refugee from Baku. The smell of the autumn air or of new notebooks bring back the feeling of safety, away from my turbulent home city. But it also brings back the anticipation of a human catastrophe and helplessness over the memories that keep flooding back.
My family made a sudden move out of Baku on September 18, 1989. After months of resisting my father’s persuasions to leave our home, my mother had a sharp, intuitive need to leave immediately. We had no plans apart from our trust in a handful of relatives in Yerevan to house us until the violence in Baku subsided. This street aggression was erupting in surges over the last year and half since Nagorno-Karabakh voted for its right to self-determination. The movement to rid Azerbaijan of its Armenian population was gaining momentum after the Sumgait and Kirovabad massacres, taking on a more organized and precise form. Something suddenly scared my mother and we were gone.
The day before we left my home forever, my mother begged her friend and our next door neighbor Zhanna to leave as well. Her son Vilya was one of my best friends. Zhanna believed that because she was Azerbaijani through her father’s side, despite her mother being Armenian, that she, her son and mother would be spared. But she wasn’t. She died of a heart attack at the age of 37. Her Armenian mother died of debilitating injuries after being smuggled into Russia. Her son was hidden in Baku like a precious gem for over a month and then also smuggled into Russia to live in coldness and poverty for the remainder of his childhood.
My parents still beat themselves up for not pushing Zhanna harder to leave, but they also understand how difficult it was during Soviet times to make the sudden move into nowhere without permission to work or live outside of Baku, away from the comforts of our apartment and our life. It was even harder for a single parent like her. Such was the fate of many Baku Armenians who believed for months that they would never be slaughtered the way they were. “The Soviet government would never allow such Azerbaijani disobedience,” all of us thought. And many Armenians simply had nowhere to go.
It was incomprehensible for my family to imagine what would have happened if we had stayed. Would they break through our door? Would Papa be stabbed or beaten to death? Would Mama be raped or burnt alive as many Armenian victims were in Baku, Sumgait and Kirovabad? Would I survive like Vilya did? Those were the thoughts of an 11 year old child imagining the fate of her family at the hands of Azerbaijani government’s tools of Armenian destruction.
Between February 1988 and September 1989 we came across many instances where death was around the corner, while we hid in the dark, waiting out the storms of violence outside our dining room windows. My father was always armed with knives. At the time, my Grandmother was the only person who knew that I escaped near rape by our Azerbaijani neighbor. We didn’t tell my father in fear of what he might do or what might be done to him. But Baku of January 13—19, 1990 was a different animal. It was executed with surgical precision; with mass numbers. Only the addresses of Armenian families were targeted. People were slaughtered; then the survivors were shipped out of Baku by the military, across the Caspian Sea just like my ancestors were in 1918.
Azerbaijanis rid themselves of Armenians again, and with them, they rid the country of intellectual capital. We built Baku. Our history, along with our people, was erased. It remains only in the minds of the many who still remember the old Baku; those same silent ones that long for the past when Armenians and Greeks and Russians brought diversity, culture, beauty and prosperity to the Capital city. These same people tell me how everything Armenian is being destroyed and demolished, to be replaced with gaudy shiny skyscrapers; that the Azerbaijanis suffer from fear of being targeted by the despotic dictator; that they suffer from unemployment and poverty in the shadows of those ostentatious towers.
It is inconceivable for me to go through life without this cross we bear as Baku refugees. Once in a while I try to imagine what it would feel like if none of this happened; who I would be like had I grown up in peace and security. But I snap out of my introspection when I remember just how lucky we are as a family, with few cuts and bruises. I recently found Vilya. My best friend grew up as an orphan without a mother, a father, or grandmother. My other close Baku friend left her house without one single picture of herself as a child. Many families lost children, sisters, brothers, parents and grandparents. I cannot comprehend how they move on and grow and thrive and succeed. And they do.
We remember the beauty that made Baku our home and we are aware it no longer exists there. We bring this beauty with us to the thousands of communities across the world where Baku Armenians make their homes, from the United States to Germany, Norway to Australia. Armenian Nation will never let this happen to us or our descendants again. I am sure of it. And no matter how long it has been, 25 years or 100 years, we are here and we resist, each in our own meaningful way, the Aliyev government’s efforts to change history. This is the least we can do to honor the innocent victims of the heinous crimes by Azerbaijan.
China arrests 10 Turks for supplying fake passports to ethnic Uighurs Report
Heavily armed Chinese paramilitary policemen march in Urumqi. (Photo: AP, Ng Han Guan)
Police in Shanghai have arrested 10 Turkish nationals suspected of supplying fake passports to ethnic Uighurs from China’s far-western region of Xinjiang who were described as “terror suspects” by state media.
Hundreds of people have been killed in resource-rich Xinjiang, strategically located on the borders of central Asia, in violence in the past two years between the Muslim Uighur people who call the region home and ethnic majority Han Chinese.
Another 11 people, including nine Xinjiang “terror suspects”, were also detained in November while trying to leave China after paying 60,000 yuan ($9,700) for altered Turkish passports, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei did not elaborate on the case but told a news conference on Wednesday the report was “extremely accurate”.
“Fighting illegal immigration is a common desire of the international community and is the Chinese government’s consistent position as well as what (the government) advocates. We are willing to cooperate closely with the international community of this issue,” he said.
The Turkish embassy in Beijing did not respond to requests for information about the case.
The paper said “terrorism-related audio and video materials were found among the suspects and that some had been bound for Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
In October, Malaysian authorities detained 155 Uighurs in Kuala Lumpur who were carrying Turkish passports suspected to be fake.
Separately, authorities in Xinjiang announced that people buying fireworks for Chinese New Year would have to register using their ID cards, the China Daily reported late on Tuesday.
The move was meant to prevent “terrorists” from obtaining raw materials to make explosives, it quoted Li Jianghui, an official with Xinjiang’s work safety department, as saying.
Fireworks shops must record the variety and number of products bought by each customer, he said.
China blames “Islamist militants” from Xinjiang for attacks elsewhere in China, including Beijing. Exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say the government’s repressive policies in Xinjiang, including controls on Islam, have provoked unrest.
A group of “mobsters” on Monday tried to set off an explosive device in a business district of Xinjiang, prompting police to shoot dead six of them, local authorities said.
Turkey Court imposes media ban on coverage of Syria-bound trucks after new revelations
Turkish gedarmerie forces checking the cargo of a Syria-bound truck in the southteastern province of Adana in this January, 2014 file photo. (Photo: Cihan)
A local court in the southern province of Adana issued a ban on media coverage of an ongoing trial into the interception of Syria-bound trucks that belonged to the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) by gendarmes acting on a prosecutor’s order, Turkey’s broadcasting watchdog announced on Wednesday.
In a press statement released on Wednesday, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) said the Adana 5th Court of Peace ruled on Wednesday that visual, print and online coverage of the investigation into the stopp and search of the Syria-bound trucks on Jan. 19, 2014, in Adana and on Jan. 1, 2014, in Hatay’s Kırkhan district is banned on the grounds that the investigation on the issue is still underway.
The court ruling comes one day after an anonymous Twitter account published new revelations in the case involving what appear to be illegal arms shipments by the Turkish spy agency to opposition groups in Syria.
A Twitter account with the handle @LazepeM published written proceedings related to the search and seizure of the MİT trucks based on suspicions that they were carrying weapons to Syria. The documents, which revealed the trucks were carrying weapons, were also published on many other websites, including on some Facebook accounts.
The prosecutor involved in the case is demanding aggravated life sentences for the 13 gendarmes involved, accusing them of putting national security at risk by stopping and searching the trucks and by revealing the identities of the MİT personnel on the trucks.