On 30 July, Joseph Aoun became the first Lebanese head of state to set foot in Turkey in seventeen years. Erdoğan received him in Ankara with full ceremony, promised “all possible support” for rebuilding the devastated south, and floated the idea of folding Lebanon into the regional security bloc Turkey is assembling with Syria’s neighbours.

Three weeks earlier the prime minister, Nawaf Salam, had been in Istanbul, pressing for the relationship to be raised to what he called the level of a strategic partnership. And in June, before either visit, Erdoğan had stated that Turkish security “does not begin in Hatay, but in Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut,” and called the two Arab capitals sisters of Istanbul.

From there the story more or less tells itself, and much of the regional press has been telling it. It has an ironic side to it as well. A year ago, Turkey was talking about sectarian politics taking over under the banner of the ‘Lebanonization of Turkey’. Now, there is great interest in the Arab and the US media about Turkey’s closer involvement in Lebanon. And the question forwarded is something along the lines of ‘is Turkey Tehran’s heir in Lebanon?’ Well, this was the actual question of a piece published in Carnegie’s Diwan in December 2025.

I would say, definitely not. Not because Erdoğan’s Turkey would not want it but because the equation is totally different with Turkey than with Iran.

The event that actually broke Iran’s hold on Lebanon did not take place in Lebanon but in Syria. When Bashar al-Assad fell and Ahmed al-Sharaa took power in Damascus, the overland route that had carried Iranian money and weapons from Tehran through Iraq and Syria to the Lebanese border was cut. Therefore, Hezbollah’s supply line closed.

In the aftermath of Assad’s fall, Turkey moved as the principal patron of the new Syrian government, and it is there, upstream, that Turkey does its real work on Lebanon. By keeping Syria in a Turkish rather than an Iranian orbit, Erdoğan keeps that corridor shut, and a closed corridor does more to weaken Hezbollah than anything Turkey could attempt inside Lebanon itself.

As for inside Lebanon… Turkey’s reach is shallow and its ceiling is low. We should see that. Yes, it can broker Beirut’s dealings with Damascus on the questions that divide them, the border, the return of Syrian refugees, trade across a long and porous frontier. And, yes, it brings reconstruction money and commercial weight at a moment when much of the south is rubble and the economy has not recovered.

Also, as a NATO member with an unusually friendly line to Trump, Turkey offers Beirut a measure of diplomatic cover, and a way to stop depending solely on France and the Gulf for that matter. This is a broad but, like I said, shallow form of influence compared to Iranian influence, exercised between states, and it is capped by an old rule of Lebanese politics, that no single foreign patron is ever allowed to dominate. France, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and now the American and Israeli track, all keep their positions. Turkey’s ceiling in Lebanon is therefore far lower than its ceiling in Syria.

The deeper reason Turkey cannot simply replace Iran is that Iranian power in Lebanon never worked the way people imagine outside influence working. Turkey operates through conventional soft-power networks, embassies, investment, humanitarian organizations and the like. Whereas Iran, over forty years, built Hezbollah on a Shia social base, a coherent ideology, a steady flow of money and an arsenal that outmatched the Lebanese army. That is a very particular instrument, and Turkey has nothing resembling it, and could not construct one if it tried. What Ankara can be is one pole among several, a broker and an economic partner alongside the Gulf, France and Washington. For Lebanon that is probably the healthier arrangement. It is also a much weaker form of leverage than the one it is being compared to, Iran.

The other patron's Lebanese man

Now the second side, which is the one I think matters more.

While the cameras follow Aoun to Ankara, an older and different outside project is under way in Lebanon, and it is being built inside the machinery of Lebanese politics. Its most energetic carrier is a Beiruti banker, Antoun Sehnaoui.

So who is he?

On 29 July, a judge of the Court of Cassation ordered security forces to detain and question Antoun Sehnaoui if he set foot in the country, on a charge of dealing with the Israeli government under a boycott law that has been on the books since 1955. The trigger was a photograph, published by the Axios correspondent Barak Ravid, of Sehnaoui seated near Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife at a Washington dinner held in memory of the late senator Lindsey Graham. The first instinct in Beirut was to assume the image was fabricated. Technical experts were asked to check and found it genuine.

Antoun Sehnaoui chairs SGBL, the Société Générale de Banque au Liban, one of the country’s largest banks. When Lebanon’s banking system collapsed in 2019, in what came to be understood as a state-backed pyramid scheme that left ordinary depositors locked out of their savings and blew a hole in the financial system now estimated at around seventy billion dollars, Sehnaoui was among the bankers who kept both their control and their fortunes intact. He fought the proposals that would have made shareholders absorb the losses first, and years later he has still not repaid depositors a cent. He also faces separate money-laundering charges tied to currency transfers his bank made as the crisis broke. Most of this is documented at length in a five-part investigation published in late July by the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour, whose reporting, drawn from named sources, court files and Sehnaoui’s estranged uncle Maurice speaking on the record, is the most careful account we have of him. Kudos to good journalism!

What that five-part dossier also lays out is the assembly of a domestic influence machine with a familiar shape.

There is money, the bank and the fortune preserved through the collapse. There is media. Since the crisis Sehnaoui has funded a cluster of outlets, the French-language Ici Beyrouth, the Arabic Hunna Lubnan and the English-language This Is Beirut, aimed in turn at the Lebanese public, the domestic Arabic audience, and the diaspora and Washington.

There is a political network, cousins and allied members of parliament, several of them seated on the finance committee that has quietly buried every bill on bank restructuring and the distribution of the crisis losses.

There is a hand in the state itself. In Lebanon, senior public posts are shared out among the sects, and behind the formal machinery they are shaped by private money and family connection as much as by government. Sehnaoui has reached into that process. L’Orient-Le Jour reports that he worked to secure the appointment of Nada Hamadeh as Lebanon’s ambassador to Washington, the most important diplomatic post for a country now negotiating its future with the United States and, through it, with Israel. And at the roughest end there is an alleged coercive arm. A small, black-clad, ultra-Christian group based in the Achrafieh district of Beirut, which calls itself the Soldiers of God, or Junoud al-Rab, first drew public notice in 2022 when its members attacked a Beirut Pride display and threatened the city’s LGBT community. Reporting has since linked its members to guarding SGBL branches and the offices of Ici Beyrouth, and to the fatal stabbing of an official of a rival Christian party, the Lebanese Forces, in 2024. Sehnaoui denies any connection to the group.

Then there is the direct line into Washington. Sehnaoui's partner is Morgan Ortagus, until this year Trump's deputy special envoy for the region and one of the American officials shuttling in and out of Beirut during the Israel talks. According to L'Orient-Le Jour, it was not long before he became known around DC as "the Lebanese AIPAC guy [AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Israel lobby in the United States]." His English-language outlet carry regular contributions from figures1 who hold posts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the two pro-Israel think tanks that have done most to press the case in Washington for isolating Hezbollah's finances.

This is where the two halves of the story meet, and where I want to be precise about the join, because it is easy to overstate.

When I was asked recently by several journalists from Lebanese outlets about Turkey and Lebanon, I argued that Israel’s likely response to Turkey’s rise would run partly through Washington, through think tanks arguing that ‘an assertive, Islamist Turkey is a problem for American interests’, and partly through deepening its own arrangements with Beirut, above all the framework agreement signed in June. The framework agreement is the trilateral document that the United States, Israel and Lebanon signed in Washington on 26 June, at the close of the fifth round of American-brokered talks. Under it, the Lebanese army is to move into the south and take control of territory as Israel makes limited withdrawals from a handful of pilot zones, with the whole sequence conditioned on the disarmament of Hezbollah. Israel keeps its freedom to strike, and Hezbollah has rejected the agreement outright.

Both of those pressures pass through Sehnaoui’s network. In mid-July, as Aoun prepared for Ankara, the FDD published a piece arguing that Beirut’s turn to Turkey was really a way to avoid disarming Hezbollah. The same think tank supplies writers to Sehnaoui’s own newspaper. Several of the people who fill the pages of This Is Beirut hold posts at these same Washington institutions. Its columnist Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a fellow at FDD, and Hanin Ghaddar, named in the reporting as directing the outlet, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. So the analysts making the case in Washington against Hezbollah, and against a larger Turkish role in Lebanon, are the same people writing it up for a Beirut readership.

And the framework agreement itself was signed for Lebanon by Nada Hamadeh, and for Israel by Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, whom Sehnaoui’s This Is Beirut had hosted for an exclusive interview six months earlier. The American and Israeli track that I described in the abstract, as one of the outside poles contending in Lebanon, turns out to have a domestic Lebanese carrier, and this is Antoun Sehnaoui.

Now the caution. There is a second account of Sehnaoui, published by the American website the Grayzone, which casts him as the man running a fascist militia and doing Israel’s dirty work, and traces to him a coordinated campaign to strangle Al-Qard al-Hassan, the Hezbollah-linked lender that offers interest-free loans to poor Lebanese. Some of that goes well beyond what can be shown. The Grayzone itself concedes there is no direct proof that Sehnaoui moved against Al-Qard al-Hassan. Sehnaoui flatly denies any tie to the Soldiers of God and has sued outlets that assert one.

What I’m trying to understand is how the influence is structured, which may or may not have actual firepower. Surely Sehnaoui does not command a mass movement, nor an army, and his alleged muscle is a fringe group whose links to him he vehemently denies. But set these contested claims aside, and I believe the documented core is still substantial and important to watch. That is: A fortune shielded while a country was ruined, a media network, a bloc of friendly deputies, a name on the donor wall of the US Holocaust Museum, where Ortagus told the room that what he was doing was ‘technically illegal in Lebanon’, and two arrest warrants from his own state. Even reduced to what is proven, it is really hard not to consider this a patron-client apparatus, with the Netanyahu government as the patron, being built inside the Lebanese system. This apparatus sits below the level of states.

People keep asking whether Turkey can fill the space Iran left. It is a good question. In the sense that it is easily exciting. But incomplete, and through the wrong lens. The boring fact is that Turkey operates at state level when it comes to Lebanon. It did not do it this way during the Muslim Brotherhood’s stint in power and Ennahda’s rule in Tunisia. The Erdoğan regime had a strong below-state-level relationship with these groups between 2011 and 2013. But not with Lebanon. It cannot tap into Lebanon’s Sunni base, whose patron has always been Saudi Arabia.

There is a deeper obstacle too. The one part of Lebanon that answers to a single command is the Shia bloc Iran built around Hezbollah. Naturally, nothing else in the country is put together that way. Power outside the Shia bloc is scattered across too many hands at once, the sects and their movements, the urban notables, the local bosses who deliver their own districts, the business and banking families, the secular currents, and none of them takes orders from one authority. An outside power that reaches into a field shaped like that comes away with deals of convenience that last a for a period of time not with a client it can keep. You know what I mean.

So, maybe, just maybe… The influence that may reshape Lebanon from the inside is being built lower down, and may be by Israel, via Washington networks.

I followed the political developments regarding the Kurds in multiple countries over the last couple of weeks with a mixture of relief and anxiety.

Syrian president al-Sharaa hosted Iraqi Kurdistan leader Nechirvan Barzani. What a hosting, though. A giant Kurdistan flag was put next to the Syrian flag. Sources close to Barzani claimed that he was very impressed. Al-Sharaa then tweeted about the meeting in Kurdish, but this time his audience was Kurds in Syria, because the dialect was Kurmancî, the dialect of Syrian Kurds.

A couple of days later, the Syrian Kurds’ leader in north-east Syria, Mazloum Abdi, and İlham Ahmad came to Damascus and met with al-Sharaa. The integration of their armed forces and administration, formerly known as AANES or the Rojava administration, into the Syrian state and army apparently came to its final stage. Ahmad was offered, once more, the position of deputy foreign minister, as the second man to Asaad al-Shaibani. We do not know her response. It is also said that Abdi refused any government position but is preparing to establish a political party.

Syrian Kurds and Sharaa’s gestures

What these two meetings prove is that the Sharaa government is making real headway in its rapprochement with the Kurds. Only six months ago, government forces and the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces, led by Mazloum’s armed force, the YPG) clashed in Sheikh Maqsoud, Arab groups within the SDF defected to the government side, and the Kurds were forced to concede, relinquishing their semi-autonomous status and folding their armed force into the national army. Many analysts and interested parties argued ex post facto that Mazloum and the leaders in Rojava had miscalculated and forfeited Rojava’s autonomous status. I disagreed.

First, it is much easier to advise in hindsight. It was the only right move to concede, to prevent carnage and bloodshed. The slight blindness came, in my opinion, in their misinterpretation of the status quo and the geopolitics in the aftermath of Assad’s fall and Sharaa’s assuming power. Unnecessarily, they delayed finalizing better deals with al-Sharaa in the hope that he would fail and be removed. That was a misread. However, these last two weeks proved that those marginal losses would be amended too. The Sharaa government is eager for stability, legitimacy, and, as a reward, foreign investment. A resolved Kurdish issue, even backing from the Kurds, would reinforce Sharaa’s hand.

As for the Kurds in Syria, their position is far better than it was before, above all under Assad, whose state refused to recognize them as a people. A Syrian president posting, or issuing a statement, in Kurdish would once have been inconceivable. But I am not one to overstate such gestures, since they often cost the state next to nothing and do little to improve the lives and standing of ordinary Kurds. The Erdoğan government is a virtuoso of the empty gesture. So I know them by heart and recognize them from quite a distance, evvelallah. Yet Kurds in both Iraq and Syria seemed gratified by the warmth and the theatre of Barzani’s and Abdi’s meetings with Sharaa, which suggests that these gestures matter to them, and that should be enough.

In this context, another reason I judge the Syrian Kurds’ position to be better than before is that Turkey’s assaults on them have ceased, contingent on two conditions. First and foremost, the Rojava administration and the SDF/YPG must be dissolved and their armed forces absorbed into the Syrian army. This is precisely what Turkey has pressed for relentlessly since Sharaa took power.

Amnesty bill for the PKK militants

The second condition runs on a parallel track, the negotiation between the Turkish state and the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. The YPG was Öcalan’s creation, and when he opened the current negotiations with Turkish state, he wrote several letters mapping the way ahead to the PKK’s armed branches and its leaders. One went to Mazloum Abdi, counselling integration into the Syrian state and a role as one of the leading forces in rebuilding post-Assad Syria. Two parallel armies, he wrote, meaning the Syrian state military and Abdi’s YPG, could not coexist, and the YPG had fulfilled its founding purpose. Sipan Hemo, a former SDF commander appointed deputy defence minister for the eastern region under the integration deal, made the same case on the civil side, declaring that ‘there cannot be two administrations in one state’. The SDF’s integration is now almost complete.

Alongside these developments, Turkey’s negotiations with the PKK reached another milestone. On 12 May 2025, the group had announced that it was disbanding, that its armed struggle was over, and that the Kurdish movement would carry on its fight for greater recognition and democracy by peaceful means.

A bill passed the Turkish parliament this week as part of that process. It is an amnesty law governing PKK militants and the terms on which they can come down from the mountain without fear of reprisal or imprisonment. Its scope is narrow. It does not cover every militant, it withholds amnesty from the senior leadership, and it comes hedged with conditions.

For it to take effect, the PKK’s disarmament must first be certified by Turkey’s intelligence service, the MİT, and then by the National Security Council, the MGK. A stretch of road still lies ahead before ‘some’ militants can petition their local prosecutor for the law’s benefit. Öcalan and the leadership in Qandil are granted no release and no new legal standing at this stage. I doubt a further stage will come that lets them practise politics in Ankara.

I take this to be the furthest the Turkish state will go in what remains a transactional bargain, and the Kurdish party DEM and Öcalan appear, for now, to accept it. Qandil takes a contrasting view, calling the bill as it stands too narrow and warning that full disarmament cannot be delivered unless Öcalan is free to lead the process. That may become a sticking point over the short to medium term. From the outset there has been a mismatch over how the process is cast, and this law does nothing to close it. Qandil prefers to treat it as an opening move, ‘just the start’. The government frames it as a closing settlement.

So what happens next?

I would not expect a descent from the mountain, certainly not en masse, when and if the disarmament is confirmed and the bill becomes law. The first stage explicitly excludes the roughly two hundred senior cadres in Qandil, who are barred from entering Turkey altogether. They may decamp to Brussels, Köln, or Paris, though they will most likely remain in Iraq's Sulaymaniyah. For everyone else, coming down means a probation file and curtailed political rights. And the incentive to approach a prosecutor, claim the law's benefit, and somehow face down a Turkish courtroom is slender for fighters schooled, rightly or wrongly, to distrust the state. What I foresee is a trickle of low-level or token cases, at most.

As for the disarmament, laying down the armed struggle is one thing and surrendering the arsenal quite another. The PKK has reserved the right to self-defence precisely so as to keep its weapons in the mountains until it deems 'it is safe to do so'. Yet the bill ties implementation to the state's certifying a handover. Either side can seize on that gap. Even so, I would resist the notion that the armed struggle will resume. If the process fails, I do not think a return to the mountains and renewed war on Turkey would be the PKK's default fallback. The likelier failure scenario would be a frozen process with the amnesty bill left in the books.

Extra pressure on the opposition

In the meantime, this bill caused, I think, an expected sense of division within the opposition this week. The main opposition leader, Özgür Özel, whom I called the Odysseus of Turkey’s opposition in my previous column, was left between a rock and a hard place.

The base of his new party, Yeni Parti, has a nationalist, Kemalist core that is against this process for two reasons. The first is the good old nationalist one, considering negotiation with the PKK, and amnesty for its militants, as something akin to treason. The other reason is that Erdoğan would use this process to pull the Kurdish party into a bargain to change the constitution, so that he can run for the presidency for a third time, which is not possible in its current state. Which can happen.

The broader case against lending the process support also has merit. Authoritarianism in Turkey has tightened to the point where few believe the Erdoğan regime would ever let a genuine rival walk free. The regime has clawed back nearly all the municipalities it lost in the 2024 local elections through lawfare, bending the judiciary to jail the mayors on flimsy charges, hold them through the long wait for trial, and strip them of office. Set against that, a democratic reform meant to settle decades of Kurdish grievance looks like a charade. So Yeni Parti should have voted No on the bill, its supporters argued. Even if the bill have passed regardless, the party would at least made its position clear.

Yet… A No would have cost it Kurdish support, and to Kurdish voters the amnesty means a great deal. Özel saw the trap and freed his MPs to vote as their constituencies dictated, while he, as leader, voted yes, on the ground that he stood for peace and an end to violence. To my mind that was a deft move, and the best available to him.

I understand some of the anger directed at Özel for backing the deal, and it is well founded, since it is hard, close to impossible, to imagine the Erdoğan regime in its present form doing anything other than turning every opening to its own advantage and pressing on with the crackdown. Yet a cooler view helps too. This regime will grind on with its merciless authoritarianism whether or not the process with the Kurdish movement goes ahead, whether or not this amnesty bill passed. A new party ought to think in the long term and take part in an attempt at resolution, even one launched by an undemocratic actor. The global record shows that undemocratic regimes, too, embark on conflict resolution and see it through.

Grievances pile onto each other

The resentment, though, runs well beyond Yeni Parti and into the broader public, much of which read the bill as a lavish concession to a ‘terrorist who took a great many lives’ over the past forty years. Other grievances pile onto that perception, a wretched economy, a crushing living costs, inflation that will not come down, a relentless crackdown on freedoms, all of it folding into the sense that the state has caved to a terror group. The fault lies with the Erdoğa regime, which, in its vanity, imagined it could run this transactional process without much bothering to prepare the public for it. For the government, as I have argued in post after post in this publication, the opening to the Kurdish movement was forced by developments across the Middle East, above all Israel’s hostile moves. And as the nationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli put it, this was not an AKP undertaking but a Turkish state one, which is why he, at the head of the nationalist MHP, drove it.

Whether Erdoğan can manage the public’s resentment over the amnesty law remains to be seen. He has the skill for it. That is for sure. But I am less sure of his will, or his bandwidth. As for the Kurdish movements in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, these strike me as small but consequential steps forward.

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Ankara, Tuesday 28 July 2026. Iraq and Turkey had finished a day of talks and moved to the part where the cameras want a row of ministers signing folders. One folder went unsigned.

Erdoğan, noticing the count was short, asked whether there were not meant to be five agreements. He made a gesture with his hand, opening five fingers, and underscored it first in English, then in his limited Arabic.

‘Five! Khamsa! Hakan?’ He called Turkey’s foreign minister to the podium to explain. Fidan said something to Erdoğan, his back turned to the cameras. We do not know what.

Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq’s prime minister since May, turned to his transport minister, Wahb al-Hasni, and asked him in Arabic why he had not put his name to the document on the Development Road, the road-and-rail corridor meant to carry Gulf cargo from the port of Faw up through Iraq and into Turkey.

The transport minister responded inaudibly.

Zaidi asked, ‘Shu mushkila?’ (What is the problem?), then told the transport minister, in front of the cameras, to sign now.

Unsurprisingly, the video travelled fast, and everyone watched it as an embarrassment on the part of the Iraqi state. It is also a fair map of how power works in Iraq now, and of how it got that way.

The transport ministry has since called it a protocol failure, pointing to a last-minute objection from Iraq’s oil ministry, which argued the agreement should have gone before parliament first.

That may be true. But it does not settle whether something more deliberate sat underneath, and Iraqi commentators remain divided over whether the ‘Ankara incident’ was a political refusal or ordinary confusion over paperwork. And there is an important reason for this two-way political reading.

The transport minister, Wahb al-Hasni, is not a technocrat who wandered into the wrong seat. He is a man of the Badr Organization, and for years he ran the office of Badr’s leader, Hadi al-Amiri. To see why a Badr minister might decline to sign Iraq westward into a Turkish and Gulf orbit, you have to know what Badr is.

Iran’s top instrument in Iraq

It is the oldest Shia militia in Iraq and the one with the closest ties to Iran. The German analyst Guido Steinberg calls it, flatly, Iran’s most important instrument in the country.

It began in the early 1980s as the Badr Corps, the armed wing of an exile party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, whose members had fled to Iran when Saddam Hussein’s persecution of Shia clerics and activists intensified at the end of the 1970s. From the start it was a sub-unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), built from Iraqi exiles and prisoners of war, and during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s its men fought on the Iranian side against their own country’s army. Everything else about Badr grows from where it was born. Its founding generation did not drift towards Tehran later in life. They were made there.

In terms of ideology, Badr adheres to wilayat al-faqih, the principle Ayatollah Khomeini built the Islamic Republic on, which holds that in the absence of the hidden twelfth Imam the Shia community should be led by a supreme religious jurist. In Iran that jurist is the Supreme Leader. So for a committed Badr member, he is the highest religious and political authority there is, above any Iraqi office.

The Badr leader al-Amiri has said so repeatedly, and presents himself as a Shia internationalist, a man for whom the unity of the Shia world under Iranian leadership counts for more than the integrity of the Iraqi nation-state.

Badr’s strength inside Iraq rests on two things it seized after the US invasion in 2003 and never let go of. The first is territory. It controls Diyala province northeast of Baghdad and has a grip on Salah al-Din, a base no other Shia militia holds in the same way, which is why some scholars describe Badr as a state within the state on the Hezbollah model. The second is the interior ministry. When a Badr figure, Bayan Jabr, took that ministry in 2005, its police and commando units became instruments of the sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007, running death squads and secret prisons against Sunnis, and Badr’s people stayed lodged in the ministry long after Jabr left.

There is a detail here that turns the ‘Ankara incident’ into something close to a rhyme with the past. From 2010 to 2014 the transport minister of Iraq was Hadi al-Amiri himself, who, Steinberg notes, used the ministry’s budget to build up his militia. The transport portfolio is Badr turf. A decade ago, its leader ran it as a source of money and patronage. So I believe all of this makes the ‘Ankara incident’ hardly a protocol mistake.

The Turkish side knew this. They knew about the transport minister’s missing MoU, and Erdoğan had turned it, intentionally, into a live event for a reason. The calling of Hakan Fidan to the stage, and asking for the ‘khamsati’ paperwork, were all part of a plan to push the Iraqi minister, or the Badr establishment within the state, to a fait accompli, and in a way make them conspicuous to the rest of the world.

How it came to this

But also remember that none of this was inevitable, and the second thing we need to remember is another culprit that turned the Iraqi state into this factionalized apparatus. The 2003 American invasion. The occupation banned the Baath Party and purged its members from public life down to schoolteachers and clerks, a policy it called de-Baathification, and it dissolved the Iraqi army, throwing hundreds of thousands of trained and armed men out of work. In the vacuum of a weakened or non-existent state emerged the one force that had spent two decades preparing for it. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard had pushed its Iraqi proxies across the border, Badr among them, and the late Khamenei, who had called Saddam’s removal a gift from God, now had an open country to work in.

The IRGC aimed at ‘the Lebanonization of Iraq’, a sectarian divide within the Iraqi state apparatus that they could manipulate, and the man who ran it was the late Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guard that handles Iran’s militias abroad. Soleimani tried to build a spread of armed Shia parties loyal to Tehran, each holding a piece of the state, none answerable to it. For a while the Iranians hoped the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army could be turned into an Iraqi Hezbollah, with Sadr as a new Hassan Nasrallah, the man who led Hezbollah in Lebanon. Sadr proved too unpredictable and too much his own man for the part. Badr and the harder factions took it up instead.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqi prime minister through the worst of the sectarian years, was said to be Soleimani’s man in Baghdad, kept in office in 2010 on Iranian insistence even after a rival won more seats. The 2005 constitution helped, carving the state into sectarian and ethnic shares and handing each community its slice of the spoils. Then in 2014, when ISIS overran a third of the country and the army collapsed, Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf called Iraqis to arms, tens of thousands answered, and the militias were gathered into a state-funded umbrella called the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) or the Hashd ash-Shaabi. Tens of thousands of its fighters were later folded into the official security forces, out of a force that has since grown to well over a hundred thousand. The proxy was now inside the state, drawing a state salary.

Soleimani was killed by an American drone at Baghdad airport in January 2020, together with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi commander who ran the Hashd day to day. Even with these two powerful men gone, the structure that Iran worked on in Iraq outlived them, a government made of armed parties that each hold ministries and provinces and cannot be disarmed by the centre, because in large part they are the centre.

Not a cabinet but a combination of factions

Where the Iraqi case parts from Lebanon is worth mentioning as well. Lebanon is a balance of weak sects. Iraq is a Shia majority sitting on national oil revenue, so what emerged there is closer to the dominance of one community’s armed parties, funded by the state’s own oil money, over everyone else. And each has a different vision of Iraq. For example, the hardest factions, Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, want an Islamic republic on the Iranian model and call themselves the muqawama, the resistance. Badr sits between them as a Shia majoritarian, nationalist in its way, but a nationalism that treats the Shia majority as the real Iraq and the rest as guests.

This is the government structure the current prime minister al-Zaidi presides over. It is less a cabinet than a treaty between armed factions, each with its ministry, its budget, its fighters and, in several cases, its patron in Tehran. Al-Zaidi is himself a compromise, installed in May after the Coordination Framework, the bloc of Iran-aligned Shia parties that has run government formation since Sadr walked his MPs out of parliament in 2022, first tried to make Maliki prime minister again and had to drop him under blunt American pressure. Badr took its seats in the November 2025 election and its share of the spoils, the transport ministry among them. Badr has a longer game it plays with the state it sits inside. Because Badr is older and larger than the other factions, it can capture a growing slice of the official army and police and use them to steer policy, the way the Baath once colonized the state it claimed to serve. The interior ministry was the first prize. The transport ministry, and the corridor that runs through it, is the newest.

The road that Turkey wants

Turkey wants the Development Road, a rail and motorway corridor costed at some 17 billion dollars, running from the new Grand Faw Port on the Gulf up through Iraq to the Turkish border and on into Europe. An overland route that bypasses the Gulf sea lanes and the Strait of Hormuz. Two of the five documents on the table last week in Ankara belonged to it, and both were transport minister al-Hasni’s to sign. One covered rail and road links through the Fishkhabur crossing. The other was a framework for building transport infrastructure inside Iraq in exchange for Iraqi natural resources, and it is that exchange, resources pledged against roads, that carries the sovereignty charge and that the oil ministry wanted taken to parliament first.

Around this road sits the rest of the Turkish government’s Iraq policy. Iraq offered to supply Turkey with as much as a million barrels of oil a day for its own use, which Erdoğan welcomed as a way to stop relying on others, an arrangement to buy rather than a route to carry. TPAO, the Turkish state oil company, took a 15 per cent share of the Kirkuk fields that BP operates, moving Turkey from a bystander to a co-producer of Iraqi crude oil. Water, since the Tigris and Euphrates reach Iraq through Turkish dams and give Turkey a tap it can tighten. And security, meaning the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party), which declared its dissolution in 2025 and has been withdrawing to northern Iraq, where Turkey wants its remaining camps emptied and its disarmament verified.

Put together, it is an offer to pull Iraq westward, into an economic and security order anchored on Turkey and the Gulf and congenial to the US’s wish to lever Iraq out of Iran’s orbit. The American envoy who has pushed these deals put the aim without hiding it, that they would make the Strait of Hormuz an afterthought, which is another way of saying they are meant to strip Iran of the chokepoint that has long given it a hand on the region’s oil. That is the order a Badr minister who is close (more than close) to Tehran has every reason not to sign into. But the deal was signed at the end, and most probably the building of the road will commence.

Nevertheless, it was not the only problem of the Iraqi government that week. On the evening of al-Zaidi’s visit, while he was still in Turkey, American and Saudi jets struck Hashd ash-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces- PMF) sites across Iraq, from Kirkuk in the north to Basra in the south, killing around twenty of its fighters along with several Iranian advisers, in reprisal for drone attacks the militias had launched on Saudi oil facilities. Baghdad called it a flagrant violation of its sovereignty. Al-Zaidi convened an emergency security council and cancelled his first official trip to Saudi Arabia in protest. He had spent the week presiding over a signing ceremony he could not fully control and then absorbing strikes on his own soil he could not prevent.

Two days later, on 30 July, Erdoğan received a different Iraqi visitor at Beştepe. Faiq Zidan, head of the Supreme Judicial Council, unelected and holding no executive office, is widely taken to be the most powerful man in Iraq, the figure who can make and unmake prime ministers through the courts he controls. His meeting with Erdoğan, and a second with Hakan Fidan the same day, were announced without a readout. No agenda was given. But I believe none was needed. The prime minister may preside over the ceremony, but the man who runs the judiciary does the business.

So the week in Ankara is a fair picture of the larger contest. Turkey pulls Iraq west with roads and oil and the promise of becoming a corridor between continents. Iran’s project, or what is left of it, pulls the other way. Iran may be under attack by the US, but the men it placed inside the state years ago still run through it.

Twenty years after the invasion that broke the old state, Iraq is rich, courted by Turkey and the Gulf, sitting on the route everyone wants to control, but with its state carved into fiefdoms. Hardly a straightforward partner for Turkey, Iran or the US.

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Özgür Özel resigned from the Republican People’s Party on Friday together with 90 of his colleagues in parliament. A court had removed him from the party leadership in May and restored Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the man he had beaten in a party congress in 2023, to the post. The 91 filed the founding petition of a new party the same afternoon, the 103rd anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which fixed the borders of the Turkish republic in 1923 and which the CHP has always treated as its own inheritance. The party is called Yeni Parti, the New Party. This is the largest single break in the history of Turkish party politics, and its consequences run well past the CHP.

It also mattered in many households whose CHP membership dates back generations. My late father-in-law was a devoted CHP member. I am glad that he did not see these days, when Kılıçdaroğlu worked as an accomplice to the Erdoğan regime and, for his own ambitions, derailed the CHP with a court order. My husband, who had worked for the CHP during his university years, also resigned with a heavy heart and a battered sense of purpose.

Do you know what the collapse of opposition movements or parties does to the resilience and the hope of ordinary citizens in authoritarian settings?

Well, we know, we the people of Turkey. That is why so many shoulder each other to keep the faith and support Özgür Özel, who fights with all his might no matter how arduous his undertaking is and how clear it is that the moment he and his movement look like they are winning, the regime will throw more obstacles at them. Because the regime can. Because the regime needs them to fail.

How it came to this

Let me recap for those who did not follow it closely.

In May an appeal court in Ankara ruled that the CHP’s 2023 ordinary congress, the one at which Özel took the leadership from Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, had been void from the moment it opened, on the claim that delegates had been bought with money, jobs and promises of candidacy. Kılıçdaroğlu had led the party since 2010, lost every national election he contested, ran as the presidential candidate of a six-party opposition coalition in 2023 and lost that too, and had to be removed by a congress vote because he would not go on his own. The ruling wiped out that congress and everything the party had done since, including its statute and programme changes. Özel and the executive elected with him were suspended, and Kılıçdaroğlu and the organs he had headed before 2023 were put back in place.

Turkish courts have been removing politicians from office and closing parties since the multi-party system began, and the past two years have been an intensive stretch of it. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the only opposition figure who polled ahead of Erdoğan, was detained in March 2025, days before he was to be confirmed as the CHP’s presidential candidate, and has been in prison ever since. The operations then spread from Istanbul to CHP municipalities across the country, and by the CHP’s own count more than two dozen of its mayors, elected in the local elections of March 2024 that the party won outright, are now in detention or removed from office. All of that is familiar. Banning parties, jailing candidates and seizing municipalities are the ordinary instruments of an elected government that has stopped being willing to lose.

Installing the loser of an internal leadership race at the head of the party he had lost is a different order of intervention. The mechanism itself is not unheard of, since civil courts have annulled the congresses of smaller parties before and handed them to trustee boards. What has not been done before is the use of that mechanism against the main opposition party, at national scale, at the moment its presidential candidate is in prison.

The state is no longer content to attack the opposition from the outside. It has started running it from the inside, deciding who leads the CHP, which of its congresses count, which version of its statute is in force, which of its governing bodies legally exists. Other elected strongmen have jailed rivals and banned parties. None of them has sat down and rebuilt an opposition party from its own paperwork upward. Turkey is where that is being tried first.

What the CHP lost in an afternoon

The transfer was not confined to people. With 91 deputies gone, the CHP dropped to forty-four seats and fell to fifth place in parliament, losing the position of main opposition for the first time in twenty-four years. It is an important loss, because the main opposition party has the right to ask the Constitutional Court to annul legislation. That power is the only instrument the main opposition actually holds against a government majority, and the CHP no longer holds it. The New Party takes the position instead, so the power has moved sideways rather than out of opposition hands, and it now depends on a party that will spend its first months proving it legally exists. Forty-four deputies remain with Kılıçdaroğlu, and by most accounts roughly half of them object to the manner in which he returned and want a congress as soon as one can be arranged.

The identity of the New Party

The CHP is the party that founded the republic. Atatürk built it, ran the country through it as a single-party state from the 1920s, and gave it the Six Arrows as its emblem, six principles that were also meant to be the principles of Turkey itself: republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism and reformism. Written into the party programme in 1931 and into the constitution in 1937, they stood for a republic in place of a monarchy, a nation in place of a religious community, a state that drove the economy, and above all a strict separation of religion from government.

For a century the CHP was the party of the state. It was the establishment party, close to the military and the security bureaucracy, the civilian arm of the Kemalist order that the generals took themselves to be protecting, and it stayed that way until the early 2010s, when it began, unevenly, to loosen that bond and reach toward the people the old party had treated as suspects. Its longest quarrels with itself run straight out of that history. Whether it can open its doors to religious conservatives without ceasing to be the party of secularism. And what to do about the Kurds, whose distinct identity the founding republic refused to recognise and whose demand for it the party has never decided whether to meet or to fear.

Özgür Özel’s movement and the New Party he founded made a claim on that inheritance in symbols. They chose 24 July as the founding day, the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne that fixed the republic’s borders in 1923. That let him claim the founding moment without having to defend the single-party CHP of 1931 or anything that came after. The day opened with Friday prayers at the Hacı Bayram Veli mosque in Ankara, which Özel tied not to religion but to 23 April 1920 and the opening of the First Assembly, so that a gesture to devout voters could be displayed as loyalty to Atatürk rather than argued as a change in the party’s relationship with Islam. From the mosque theywalked to that First Assembly building and were photographed there, inside the story of the war of independence.

The message of the whole day was that Özel now owns the CHP’s founding legacy, with one adjustment. The republic stays. The century of quarrels with the pious does not come with it.

I think the party’s name carries the same logic. Calling itself Yeni Parti, the New Party, it has placed itself nowhere on the left-right spectrum and pushed the question of where it stands to a congress in the autumn and to a programme stitched together in the meantime from the CHP’s 2025 platform and material drafted by the office of İmamoğlu, the jailed presidential candidate. Özel describes the target as the Türkiye İttifakı, yani the Turkey Alliance, a formula he first used before the 2024 municipal elections. It is meant to gather social democrats, nationalists, conservatives and Kurdish democrats under one roof, and the only entry test he names is having no quarrel with Atatürk and the republic. Which can be a tad bit problematic for the Kurds. But nevertheless.

Who is likely to vote for it

The obvious answer is the coalition that won the municipal elections in 2024, the secular urban middle class together with a substantial number of conservative and nationalist voters who moved on the cost of living and on a diffuse sense that the country is being run unfairly. Pensioners, wage earners, small tradesmen and the young are all inside that description, and Özel’s first statement after the founding addressed those categories in sequence.

Two parts of that coalition are less secure than the polling suggests. The Kurdish vote in the western cities went to the CHP tactically in 2024, and it is now attached to a negotiation between the Kurdish movement and the state that has its own timetable and its own incentives, so it cannot be assumed a second time. There is also a hard core of voters for whom the CHP emblem is the point, who will not mark a ballot without the Six Arrows on it. They are small in number but loud in public. But against those losses, I believe the New Party can reach voters the old one could not, because a party without a hundred years of accumulated grievance attached to its name is easier to vote for once, as an experiment, in a way the CHP never was.

What will be done to stop it

As I said above, Özel’s road is filled with obstacles. A nostos, either to reclaim the CHP or to rise to power as the New Party, though the harbour he is steering for is simply an election he is permitted to fight. An odyssey out of Homer, or out of Nolan’s version of it, which to my eye is less about the monsters than about what home turns out to be and what a man learns from looking hard at himself. But whichever version we are watching, we can be sure of the rest. Cyclopses, witches, sirens, distrust, doubt, and mutiny on his own ship.

The first obstacle is money. Under the Political Parties Law a party receives treasury funding on the basis of its vote in the last general election, with a threshold of 3 per cent, and a party that did not contest that election receives nothing however many deputies it holds. The CHP’s allocation for this year, a little over 1.8 billion lira, stays with Kılıçdaroğlu. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the MHP and the AKP’s partner in the governing alliance, has helpfully observed that the money ought to be divided in proportion to the deputies who left. That would require a change in the law which his own alliance could pass in an afternoon and has not. With no treasury money, the New Party can raise funds only from private donations, and the law caps those at roughly 634,000 TRY per person a year.

The second instrument is the calendar, and it is the one that is most lethal. A party can contest a general election only if it has organised in at least half the provinces and in a third of the districts within each of them, and has held its founding congress, all of it completed six months before polling day. Until the amendment of March 2022 a party could qualify simply by having a group in parliament, and that door was closed four years ago. A snap election called this autumn would leave a party holding ninety-one seats unable to put a list on the ballot. This is why a reserve party with existing electoral qualification is being kept ready, and why the organisational work is being done at speed rather than carefully.

The third is prosecution. The immunity files are sitting in parliament and Özel’s own is among them, though the general view is that the government will not want the cost of removing him for now, which was also the general view about the congress case before 21 May. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, has been in prison since March 2025 and is being tried on three separate tracks, with the espionage case resuming in September, and the municipal investigations have continued steadily against mayors in Istanbul and beyond.

What the remnant CHP will do is a smaller question than it looks, in my opinion. It keeps the name, the emblem, the buildings, the membership rolls, the archive and the money, and it can go on describing the whole affair as a cleansing. Its capacity to damage the New Party lies mostly in electoral arithmetic, since a proportional system with an alliance threshold punishes duplication, and a CHP list running at 4 or 5 per cent in every province wastes votes that would otherwise be seats. Beyond that, Kılıçdaroğlu’s position inside his own building is not comfortable. Of the forty-four deputies who stayed, around half want a congress, some are willing to run candidates against him for group positions, and what they actually want is a leadership that neither he nor Özel would choose.

The prospect and hope

Whether Özel reaches port safely or not, we cannot predict. Set against him are all sorts of traps and perils. But let us remember…

There are still reasons for hope. The first is that this break from the CHP happened at all. The whole apparatus, the frozen funding, the rigged calendar, the waiting prosecutors, was built to make leaving unthinkable, so that no one would dare walk out and start again. 91 people walked out anyway.

The second is that there is considerable support for this new party. Under this much pressure a beaten movement usually falls apart This time people moved towards each other instead. Resigning with a heavy heart but resigning all the same because they party was wherever Özel was standing.

The third is Özel himself. He can count the odds better than anyone, he knows exactly what is waiting for him, and he has chosen to go regardless. That matters because a regime like this one does not only want to win. It wants the opposition to give up on its own, to decide the fight is pointless and go quiet. A man who refuses to despair is the one thing it cannot stand.

That is not a promise that Özel or his movement prevails. However, it is the refusal to accept that all has already lost matters the most. The monsters are real and they are waiting. But so is the shore. Vira Bismillah.

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My colleague and friend Ruşen Çakır, founder and editor-in-chief of Medyascope, one of the few outlets left in Turkey still doing independent journalism, travelled last week to Qandil, the mountain stronghold in northern Iraq that serves as the headquarters of the PKK, the armed wing of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. There he interviewed Duran Kalkan, one of the organisation’s blunt-spoken and sometimes hardline leaders.

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This week I come to you in podcast form as I promised earlier.

I interviewed Faisal Devji, a top historian and a public intellectual. He is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of some of the most original books written on Muslim political thought in the past two decades, among them The Impossible Indian, on Gandhi, and Muslim Zion, his study of Pakistan as a political idea.

He is also, I should say, a friend, and one of those rare people I get to call a friend while also looking up to him. As an intellectual, as an academic, as a teacher, Faisal has a depth and an integrity that I have come to treat as a kind of benchmark. And he is also genuinely a kind person, which in our line of work does not always travel together with brilliance.

His new bo…

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Before the US-Israeli war with Iran resumed this week, for six days in July, the Islamic Republic of Iran buried the man the United States and Israel had killed four months earlier. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader for more than three decades, died on 28 February, when a joint American and Israeli airstrike hit his office in Tehran on the opening morning of the war.

Islamic custom would have put him in the ground within days. Instead the regime waited until the bombing paused and staged the burial as a set piece. Khamenei lay in state on 4 July, the day the United States marked 250 years of independence. The ceremonies fell inside Muharram, the Shia month of mourning for the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, and the casket was draped in a flag said to have flown over Hussein’s shrine.

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Yes, we had heard this before. His love for ‘the tough guy’ that Erdogan is. In his grammatically haphazard, structurally nonsensical and semantically void sentences, US president Donald Trump stated that Erdogan is a great leader who had stood by him during his hard times (he refers to the impeachment period) and that he managed to do something no one could, that is, ‘taking Syria’. Most recently he said that he would only come to the July 2026 NATO summit because his friend Erdogan is hosting.

And he did.

Gifts and contempt

Erdogan went to Esenboğa airport to welcome Trump to the capital, Ankara. The two walked arm in arm and talked about what I do not know, as Erdogan’s English is limited to non-existent. Surely they have a special bond.

Trump came to Ankara ‘bearing gifts that would make Erdogan very happy’ and repeated, whenever he found the opportunity, that the only reason he was attending the NATO summit wa…

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Next week, Ankara will host NATO’s 36th Summit.

It is an important meeting mostly because Trump threatened to quit NATO, as he has threatened to quit almost every alliance and treaty the US is party to. He also let it be known that he would only turn up because his good friend Erdogan is hosting! Masallah to this bromance.

A couple of years ago it was Erdogan who caused trouble by refusing to accept Sweden as a member; now he has become the glue, the linchpin that holds the alliance attached to Trump.

The conventional account of Turkey’s NATO accession in February 1952 is a security story. That is, the Soviet Union had made territorial demands on Turkey in 1945, the Truman Doctrine followed in 1947, and membership in the Atlantic alliance provided the formal guarantee that American power would stand behind Turkish borders. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Turkey’s NATO journey

Turkey was twice refused N…

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While my colleagues and I sit down to read exam papers, I doubt Starmer, his cabinet, and the broader party will attempt any soul-searching about their clumsy budget management, which rightly angered pensioners, and was compounded by disability benefit cuts.

And then there was Starmer’s timid stance towards the warmongering Israeli government, and how his intransigence, as an international lawyer no less, in refusing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, cost him and his party. He just does not get this, does he?

Because that refusal was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a symptom of something deeper: a habit of mind, widespread among Western liberal leaders, of substituting legal proceduralism for moral clarity when it comes to war. It is what some scholars call the ‘juridifi…

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We have discussed over several posts what the Erdoğan regime really wants from its closeness to Ahmad al-Sharaa, the man who has led Syria since the fall of Assad. Part of it is the wish to write a success story for an Islamist government, the kind that came apart in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda. Remember how Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, recently in an interview with Al Jazeera made the subtext explicit about Syria being exactly that. True or not, it is what Erdogan government wants Syria to be, an Islamist-led state turning into a success under Erdoğan’s auspices.

But the larger pull, as I keep underscoring, is political economy. Or should I say clientelism. Influence over Syria, and inside it, gives Erdoğan’s patrimonial network of favoured businessmen somewhere to invest, above all through build-operate-transfer, the trademark arrangement of the AKP years in which a chosen firm puts up an asset and runs it for years under state guarantees …

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What, in these times, could possibly have brought Turks, Kurds and Arabs into rare agreement?

There is a kind of achievement that eludes negotiators, summits and the whole machinery of regional diplomacy, and Tom Barrack has managed it without appearing to try. The peoples of the region agree on very little, and have spent the better part of a century disagreeing violently. They now hold one thing in common. They cannot stand him.

Oh, the extent of the contempt. Scroll the replies piled beneath any of his posts, if you can spare the time, and you will find dislike in all its variations.

Wallahi maşallah to Barrack. After decades in real estate, he has turned what may prove a brief diplomatic stint into the kind of achievement many diplomats never manage in a lifetime.

Barrack, a Lebanese-American property billionaire, a friend and fundraiser of Donald Trump, and since last year the US ambassador to Turkey and the president’s envoy to Syria, had his brief widened again on 1 June. In a Tru…

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The crux: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent the past year dismantling the only party capable of beating him at the ballot box. Last week he reached its leader.

A court in Ankara stripped Özgür Özel of the chairmanship of the CHP (Republican People’s Party); the party that founded the modern Turkish republic a century ago and is now its main opposition. The court’s reasoning was technical, a dispute over how Özel was elected at a party congress two years ago. The effect was not technical at all. For the first time, a Turkish court has told an opposition party who it may not have as its leader.

Since 2024, hundreds of CHP members and elected officials have been detained on corruption charges the party rejects. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor and the candidate most able to defeat Erdoğan in a national contest, h…

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When I first started researching the relationship between Turkey’s ruling AKP and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB/Ikhwan) and Tunisia’s Ennahda in 2018, my main impetus was curiosity. I had just taken what I thought at the time was a break from my journalism career: amid an immense government crackdown, the liberal-left newspaper I was editing had been shut down, and I had embarked on an academic career for what I thought would be a fresh breath of air.

I did not return to journalism and continued on with academia. But back then the initial way in to understanding the deal among these three Islamist entities — the AKP, the Egyptian Ikhwan and Ennahda — came from my training as an investigative journalist. I am telling you this to clarify that I was not a scholar of Islamism, and my initial aim was not to come to broad conclusions about the praxis of Islam…

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Merhabalar…

This week I am including an interview in podcast form in Angle, Anchor and Voice. The reason is really simple: to let you hear the experts speak directly to you. My hope is that you come away from each conversation holding a better-formed version of the question that drew you in, rather than a neater version of its answer.

For this opening conversation I could not have asked for a more fitting scholar than Nathalie Tocci, a thinker I read with consistent admiration and one of the most incisive voices on what Europe is and on what it keeps failing to become. She holds a professorship of practice at Johns Hopkins in Bologna and a senior fellowship at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking. Between 2015 and 2022 she served as special advisor to two successive High Representatives, Federica Mogherini and then Josep Borrell, and in that role she drafted the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the text that gave the Union the language of “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” it has been struggling, with uneven results, to inhabit ever since. Her books are many, among them a co-authored volume on Turkey’s relationship with the EU. Her recent documentary, Why Europe Matters, has just been released. Here is the link to that.

I wanted to talk to her because the EU finds itself, once again, in the predicament it understands best and resents most, the predicament of having to make decisions it would rather defer. It has to decide how to deal with a Turkey that is both indispensable and impossible. It has to decide what to do about the credibility it has bled on Gaza, on enlargement, on the rule of law within its own borders. And it has to decide how to read Ursula von der Leyen, who told a Hamburg audience last month that the EU’s task was to complete the European continent so that no part of it would fall to Russia, Turkey or China. The two days that followed were spent in Brussels trying to soften the sentence. What was it all about? What is the current sentiment in Europe regarding Turkey?

Nathalie elaborates that Turkey is not viewed as one of the “baddies,” but it is also not on the “map of the goodies.” The current EU enlargement narrative is driven by a geopolitical logic of integrating a “free, secure and democratic grey zone” to prevent it from falling under adversarial influence. That logic, applied to Ukraine and Moldova, does not match Turkey’s situation.

Turkey hits a brick wall

While one could argue Turkey might one day “see the light” — e.g., post-Erdoğan — the logical next step, resuming accession, faces significant, often unconscious resistance within the EU. Because Turkey is an uncomfortable case that defies simple categorization, European discourse often avoids the topic. Nathalie identifies several sources of the “brick wall”: doubts about Turkey’s long-term potential to be a stable liberal democracy; concerns about its size and the complexity it would introduce to EU political balances; and underlying, often unstated, civilizational or religious biases.

The current “geopolitical” rationale for enlargement, which is about integrating vulnerable states for security, doesn’t apply to Turkey. Already in NATO and a strong military power, Turkey doesn’t fit the “integrate them or else” logic relevant to Ukraine. That leaves only the old, unresolved sources of resistance, making the topic hard to address.

For the other topics we touched upon — Ursula von der Leyen’s controversial statement on Turkey, the possible role of the Israeli lobby on her and other European leaders, and our collective failure to find an alternative to accession for EU–Turkey or EU–Britain relations — listen to the podcast. Once again, sorry for any unpleasantness in this podcast. I hope I will learn more along the way, and many thanks to Nathalie Tocci for her insights and her patience with me.

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The lecturer answering it was Comfort Ero, the President and the CEO of the International Crisis Group — perhaps one of the few organisations that produces genuinely granular, on-the-ground conflict analysis. Founded thirty years ago in response to the international community's failure to prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the state collapse in Somalia, and animated by the dictum ‘never again’, Crisis Group spent most of its institutional life treating Europe as the stable periphery from which the world's diso…

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On 11 April, after a Turkish prosecutor sought sentences of more than 4,596 years for Benjamin Netanyahu and thirty-five other Israeli officials over the interception of the Sumud flotilla to Gaza, Netanyahu posted on X that Israel would continue to fight Iran's terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdoğan, who accommodated them and had massacred his own Kurdish citizens. Hours later, Israel's defence minister Israel Katz went further. Erdoğan, he said, was a Muslim Brotherhood man, who massacred the Kurds. The phrase travelled the way these phrases now travel, repeated across Israeli media, picked up by Iranian outlets pleased with the symmetry, recycled in Turkish nationalist circles for the opposite reasons.

Two weeks before Katz spoke, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington published a paper title…

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While many celebrated Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán’s fall via elections at the beginning of April, some found it important to remind us of the political colour and allegiance of those who took him down. Those who are called to be killjoys underlined the fact that “what happened in Hungary is […] that after the leader had been in power for 16 years, voters wanted a fresh face, but not a fundamentally different policy.” And that “Peter Magyar is not anti-Orbán. […] What he promises to change is governance, not ideology.”

By now I can say that the way one responds to Orbán’s defeat and Magyar’s victory reveals the political posture of the observer, whether in Europe or in Turkey.

As you know, the authoritarian styles of Orbán and Erdoğan have been comparatively examined and likened for quite some time. Even though Orbán is an Isl…

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The newspaper I am holding does not move me simply because it has managed to remain a printed paper. It is the fact that it has endured, one way or another, in a harsh climate where the cold can be biting, the heat suffocating, and spring only rarely shows its face.

There is an irony here that is hard to ignore. The founding editor of this paper I hold in my hands is among those writers of modern Turkey who were taken by a brutal assassination. Yet its presence does not recall that violence so much as it instils a sense of assurance.

Much of that comes, of course, from the resilience and the peaceful character of Hrant Dink - Hrant abi - , the dear elder colleague who was murdered in 2007 in the very orbit of this newspaper, Agos. It also comes from the Agos team who treated his death as a grave turning point and chose to carry on with the same stubborn resolve.

Yetv…

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Almost two decades ago, I was working for Turkey’s top mainstream newspaper, Hürriyet, as a reporter when the editor-in-chief of the paper, Ertuğrul Özkök, decided to send me to Malaysia for a story.

I was not the only reporter from Istanbul. The other major newspaper, Milliyet, had sent its top journalist, Ece Temelkuran, now a major author whose recently released book Nation of Strangers is shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize.

Ece and I each spent a week in Malaysia without encountering one another, trying to answer a question that had come to dominate public discussion at the time.

Will Turkey become like Malaysia?

The question did not emerge in a vacuum. By 2006 and 2007, Turkey was moving through a series of political confrontations that exposed a deeper struggle over who would contro…

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