I don’t think it will end until he captures all of them. Each and every one.

He is Erdoğan. What is being captured, one by one, like a buffalo at the water’s edge, ambushed by an apex predator, are municipalities. Municipalities led by Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP.

As of today, it is clear that the March 2024 local elections meant very little. One could call them Turkey’s first “performative” elections, staged so that the façade of a democratic contestation is maintained. Or, as we say in Turkish, dostlar alışverişte görsün seçimi.

Since then, the Erdoğan government’s use of the judiciary marks a new stage in its authoritarian trajectory. Consider the numbers.

The CHP won the March 2024 elections decisively. It secured 35 cities, including 14 metropolitan municipalities, and 337 districts. The AKP, by contrast, lost almost all of the major cities it had held, including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir, and was left with 24 cities, 12 of them metropolitan, and 356 districts. Yet the situation today bears little resemblance to those results.

As things stand, 30 municipalities in Turkey are now governed by people who were not elected by their citizens. 12 are run by trustees. 18 have effectively been captured through judicial intervention. These 30 municipalities together represent a population of 28 million.

In addition, as many of you will know, Istanbul’s mayor, who is not only that but also the CHP’s likely presidential candidate against Erdoğan in the next elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has been in prison for a year. Alongside him, more than twenty other mayors, as well as numerous provincial officials and municipal employees, have been detained.

A few days ago, another CHP metropolitan mayor, the mayor of Bursa, was imprisoned. He had been under threat for some time. Through back channels, he had been offered a way out, a switch to the AKP in exchange for his freedom. He refused. He is now in prison. It is that simple. What we are looking at is a system that operates with a brazen logic. We have seen it before. In August 2025, another CHP mayor, Özlem Çerçioğlu, a party member of 23 years, avoided prison by putting on the AKP badge. Yani, the mechanism is real. And it works. Smoothly.

Why municipalities matter

Because in Turkey, as in many other countries, municipalities function as arenas where opposition forces can accumulate governing capacity even under nationally consolidated executive power. When national-level competition is foreclosed or severely constrained, local governments become the primary terrain on which alternatives can be demonstrated. The CHP’s hold on Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir matters not only electorally, but because it allows the party to develop policy credibility, patronage networks, and voter loyalty that cannot easily be built at the national level.

Because Turkish municipalities are central nodes in the allocation of public goods, contracts, employment, and social services. The AKP’s municipal dominance throughout the 2000s and 2010s was foundational to its hegemony precisely because municipalities controlled housing development, construction permits, and welfare distribution. This is why the 2024 losses were so costly for Erdoğan. Economically, yes. But symbolically as well. Erdoğan and his party became what they are through their control of municipalities. “Service to the people is like a prayer,” a motto of the AKP in its early years, and the construction of clientelistic networks, often through flexible municipal channels rather than rigid state schemes, helped produce the image of Erdoğan as a benevolent leader who delivers results, later projected outward to Egypt and Tunisia. Losing municipal power was therefore a drastic blow. One that had to be undone.

Hence the weaponisation of the judiciary and the recapture of municipalities.

Trump, Syria, Iran triangle

Özgür Özel, the CHP leader, who has been straining to resist this pressure, cancelled his entire programme after the arrest of the Bursa mayor and addressed the press a few days ago. He said:

“From the outside, Turkey is now seen as a country without democracy, without justice, where dissenting voices are imprisoned. Europe sees this. Trump sees this. They interpret what is happening as the jailing of the opposition in order to eliminate it. Yet they tolerate it, because they think in the following way. In Syria, I can change the regime and whoever I install will govern. I can strike Iran, topple it, and someone suitable to me will take over. In Venezuela, the same. In Turkey, I can change the regime and whoever I say will rule. At the moment, that person is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

For this reason, what we are experiencing is not merely a CHP issue. The multi-party democratic system, the rule of law, and the ballot box, which is the most important inheritance of the Republic founded by Atatürk, are all under threat. The local elections have already been neutralised. If the right conditions are created, the same will be done for the general elections. If not, perhaps even those will be abandoned. With Trump’s backing, there is an attempt to dismantle the republican system in Turkey and impose a new order governed by whoever Trump prefers. The situation is as clear as Venezuela, as stark as Syria, but for Trump it remains, like Iran, a place where the stakes are high. Today the target is the CHP. Because this is where opposition to the established order takes concrete form.”

Özel’s remarks reflect the anxieties of a large part of the CHP electorate. They also matter because they point to something else: Erdoğan’s personal political future is increasingly entangled with a wider disorder in which Trump and Israel move through the Middle East like an elephant in a china shop, shattering diplomacy, restraint, and any remaining sense of proportion.

As I have tried, with some urgency, to explain in earlier posts and/or podcasts, the Iran war will, as things stand, reinforce authoritarian leaders. This does not necessarily mean that they will be strengthened in foreign policy terms. The geopolitics of the Middle East shifts daily, even hourly. A Turkey that plays its cards well may still find itself targeted by Iran or Israel. Erdoğan, who is today praised by Trump as a “tough guy”, could fall out of favour just as quickly, as happened during the Brunson crisis, or as Keir Starmer has recently experienced. In this environment, every leader in the region, all of whom fit comfortably within the definition of authoritarianism, is navigating something closer to a minefield than a strategic landscape.

So when I say the Iran war will strengthen them, I mean domestically. First, it consolidates their base. Second, and more importantly, the low hum of a nearby war allows authoritarian regimes to continue the quiet suffocation of already weakened opposition forces.

Political parties and civil organisations, what remains of them in the region, are pushed further down, buried more quietly, as the world watches the war with anxious attention. Mesela… did you know that there are around 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt right now? Much the same in Tunisia, where activists and even former parliamentarians are detained on overtly politicised charges. Or that Algeria imprisons journalists, activists, and opposition figures, using elastic charges such as “undermining national unity” to criminalise dissent? Most probably you didn’t. (For a broader account of the region’s authoritarian drift, see LSE’s Fawaz Gerges here.)

This is the regional context.

It is therefore befitting that the leader of Turkey’s main opposition situates the pressure on his party and its municipalities within the triangle of the Iran war, Syria, and Trump.

For months now, voices in Israel, not marginal ones but figures such as Naftali Bennett, who stands as a serious challenger to Netanyahu, have suggested that Turkey could be next after Iran. This kind of discourse feeds, above all, a public anxiety that can rally society around Erdoğan.

A recent poll makes this visible. In a scenario where Turkey is caught in a regional war, 45 percent of respondents consider Erdoğan the safer option in power, while 29 percent prefer the opposition leader Özgür Özel. Despite the government’s economic erosion, it retains a relative advantage in matters of security and crisis management. A textbook rally-around-the-flag effect.

This is why such leaders cultivate, whether domestically or externally, a constant atmosphere of fear and crisis. Crisis, fear, conflict are allies to strongmen. They make them stronger.

5 key aspects of authoritarianism

At this point, it is worth returning to Stanford University’s Stephen Kotkin and his definition of authoritarianism and its key features.

Kotkin defines authoritarianism as the absence of institutional limits on executive power. First, there is a large repressive apparatus, deliberately subdivided into competing and rivalrous groups. This fragmentation prevents any single faction from dominating, while at the same time generating internal tensions and animosities that can be exploited by those at the top.

Second, rather than relying on a “social bargain” with citizens, which typically involves trading prosperity for parts of their freedom, these regimes depend primarily on stable cash flow. This may come from natural resources such as oil and gas, from illicit activities including counterfeiting or cyber operations, or from export driven manufacturing economies, as in China.

Third, authoritarian regimes exercise control over citizens’ access to jobs, housing, education, and travel. Kotkin describes this as control over “life chances”. The greater this control, the more effectively the regime can shape both public and private behaviour. A strong private sector can, in principle, weaken this grip, although modern surveillance technologies complicate the picture. Totalitarian systems approach near total control, while authoritarian ones retain small openings that citizens can still navigate, including the ability to travel abroad.

Fourth, these regimes produce compelling narratives to justify their hold on power. These often draw on a glorified imperial past, promises of restored greatness, and the identification of internal and external enemies, frequently presented as acting in concert and blamed for past failures. The regime presents itself as uniquely capable of defeating these enemies and reclaiming national strength.

This is why I tend to push back against those in academic and media circles who insist on describing Erdoğan’s policies as driven by neo-Ottoman ambitions. Erdoğan is, in fact, a political realist. He is careful not to invoke Ottoman references in his dealings with Middle Eastern leaders, precisely because he knows they would irritate them. What is described as neo-Ottomanism is better understood as a set of narratives constructed for domestic consumption, designed to sustain his authority. Not a foreign policy or civilisational impetus. Not because he lacks the desire, but because he grasps enough about global history and power politics to see that it cannot be realised.

Finally, and most relevant to the present moment, Kotkin emphasises the role of the international environment. Geopolitical shifts and conflicts can either reinforce or weaken authoritarian regimes. Commodity prices, which affect revenue streams, international sanctions, and even decisions taken by the US Federal Reserve can all have direct consequences for regime stability.

Shopping bag of the strongmen

Now let’s take stock, shall we?

The economy in Turkey is in shambles. The main topic across every segment of society is the same: the astronomical rise in the cost of living, how it has become unbearable, pushing the lower classes below the poverty line and crushing what used to be the middle class into something amorphous.

Cash reserves are depleted. The business class that supported and sustained the Erdoğan regime is no longer healthy enough to generate new markets. What they can do in Syria’s reconstruction is limited, at best acting as mid-handlers or builders with Gulf investment. In other words, dependent on Gulf money. That in turn weakens a patronage network that took decades to build.

So what is left of this shopping list?

Grand narratives. And constant conflict in the region.

And this is where the capture of opposition at home feeds on the fear and noise of war.

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In an old world, that would be very embarrassing for Trump. Not in this world. We know that Pakistan and Turkey are working hard on shuttle diplomacy between Iranian and American officials, but all sources agree that Iran is not and will not agree to the terms Trump put forth. Mostly because they do not trust him and think he is buying time to prepare for a harder strike, even a land operation to secure the enriched uranium.

I think at this time it would be a waste of time to make an educated guess regarding what Trump will do. Education is counterproductive to gauge anything about him or the people in his administration who apparently copy-pasted a list of justifications for attacking Iran, from a pro-Israeli think tank’s website and most probably prompt some AI to come up with those ‘XX-point peace/ceasefire plans’, none of which are equidistant to a just peace or a practical ceasefire.

While Trump is mercurial, spontaneous and ignorant about many things, some businessmen around him might not be. As you might have notice, his wars or war threats usually starts at the beginning of weekends, then he backtracks usually at dawn on a Monday. Same thing happened. Large, unexplained trades were placed on oil and stock markets just minutes before Donald Trump announced “productive” talks with Iran, reversing market movements and generating the potential for rapid, substantial profits.

Yani, what happened? Some men earned a lot of money. Who would those men be? Surely not business elites with an ear at the White House?!

Corruption and erraticism aside, the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz began with Israel’s expansionist and increased aggression towards Iran a couple of years ago, now culminating in a halt and shaking the global economy in a way many experts predicted it would.

The problem we have now is that this disruption in Hormuz may not be temporary but be better understood as a structural break in the energy system, one that exposes a deeper contest over supply routes, monetary power, and the limits of political control. First things first.

Why is this strait so important?

Almost a fifth of the world’s oil passes each day through a stretch of water that, at its narrowest point, is barely 50 kilometres across. 39 to be exact. The actual shipping lanes are narrower still. Just a few kilometres in each direction. Nearly twenty million barrels a day move through that corridor, alongside a share of global gas flows for which there is, in practice, no alternative route.

If the Strait of Hormuz were to close in any meaningful sense, something like a quarter of globally traded oil would be removed from circulation. Only a fraction of that could be rerouted. Perhaps five million barrels a day at best, through pipelines that are themselves exposed to other vulnerabilities. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is even more tightly bound to the passage. Close to a fifth of global LNG trade depends on it, with exporters such as Qatar and the UAE lacking viable alternatives. So the consequence would not simply be higher prices. It would be immediate pressure on electricity systems in countries that rely on those flows to keep the lights on.

But hear this: the distribution of that pressure is uneven because Asia would absorb most of it. China alone takes several million barrels a day through the Strait, alongside other Asian economies whose dependence is deeper than that of Europe or the United States.

Prof Helen Thompson, a political economy scholar at Cambridge, has been my guide on everything related to the Middle East’s energy routes, especially her framing of the 1956 Suez Crisis as one of the historical junctures in the making of the Middle East, which I wholeheartedly follow and devote time to in my Politics tutorials at Oxford. Thompson’s reading of the closing of Hormuz as one of the consequences of US/Israeli waging of war on Iran is somewhat divergent from the rest. I believe there is great value in sharing her arguments here.

There is a tendency, already visible in market pricing and policy commentary, to treat the current crisis as a disruption with an expiry date. A shock, severe but temporary. As in, supply tightens, insurance premiums rise, and then normality returns. Wrong!

Thompson believes that the current disruption has less to do with a closure in the narrow, technical sense than with the collapse of a set of expectations that had governed the Gulf for decades. The non-Iranian oil producers of the region operated on a simple premise that, yes, Iran might threaten, harass, but it would not cross certain thresholds. For example, not direct attacks on core infrastructure. That premise has now been broken, and once broken, it is not easily restored.

Financial markets, particularly outside Asia, have not quite caught up with this shift. Oil futures still carry the trace of an older world in which risk could be priced as cyclical rather than structural, as something that would dissipate within months rather than harden into a new baseline. The expectation that the Strait will, in effect, reopen itself within a year rests on the belief that the underlying security order remains intact. But it does not. Even a substantial American security build-up would struggle to reconstitute that order. The point is not simply the presence or absence of naval power. It is the credibility of the system that power underwrites. Once the assumption of restraint has gone, every tanker carries a different calculation.

To see why this matters, it helps to step back from the immediacy of the crisis and place it in a longer frame. Helen Thompson has spent much of the last decade arguing that energy is not one variable among others in world politics but one of the conditions that makes certain political outcomes possible and others not. Her book Disorder: Hard Times in the Twenty-First Century was written in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis and, ironically, arrived on the shelves in the UK on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. What could be more timely? Yet the book’s argument runs across the entire twentieth century and into the present.

The starting point is deceptively simple. As coal gave way to oil as the decisive fuel of military and industrial power, the distribution of that resource began to structure the possibilities of states. The United States entered the twentieth century with abundant domestic oil. The European powers did not. Their expansion into the remains of the Ottoman Empire was not only imperial ambition but, concomitantly, an attempt to secure access to energy they lacked at home, financed in no small part by American capital.

By the end of the WWII, American oil and money had again underwritten victory. Yet within a few decades, the United States had joined Europe in a shared dependency on Middle Eastern oil, while the Soviet Union briefly emerged as the world’s largest producer. Very, very important to remember this part of the story when reading current affairs of the world!

These shifts did not remain confined to foreign policy but fed directly into the organisation of the global economy. The breakdown of Bretton Woods (the postwar system of fixed exchange rates anchored to the US dollar) in the 1970s coincided with a reordering of energy markets and the rise of a more financialised form of capitalism. The liberalisation era of Reagan and Thatcher did not only unleash markets but coincided with rising debt, recurrent instability, and a series of crises that culminated in 2007- 2008. Energy alone did not cause these events; however, it set constraints within which they unfolded.

We must be aware that the world is not organised around a single causal chain but around the interaction of systems that rarely align neatly with one another.

Stay with me here.

Who is the immediate loser? CHINA

Energy markets, currency regimes, democratic politics, great power competition. Each follows its own logic and then spills into the others, which is another way of saying that a disruption in one domain propagates across others.

Oil, sitting at the centre of this web, links military capacity to economic growth, ties the fortunes of producers to price fluctuations they do not fully control, and binds consumers into dependencies that cannot be easily unwound. The same entanglement shapes the present, Thompson argues. China’s emergence as an industrial power has altered not only trade flows but the structure of global energy demand. Its manufacturing dominance has been built on integration into a dollar-based system that it does not control, while its energy needs tie it to supply routes that run through regions shaped by American power.

A-ha!

Which brings the question of the Strait of Hormuz and the motive behind the attack on Iran, something no expert could quite figure out the calculation for the US.

Thompson provides another reading.

Could it be that the disruption in Hormuz is not an unintended consequence of a campaign against Iran but part of a wider strategic calculus aimed at China?!

A-ha x 2!

Could Trump have planned this all along?

So the target is not only a regime but a supply chain of energy. Thompson underscores a sequence we might have missed, I had missed for one.

It is that the crisis of Hormuz did not begin with an Iranian declaration but began when insurers withdrew. Once firms such as Lloyd’s of London stopped underwriting transit through the Gulf, the Strait was already compromised. Tankers without insurance do not sail.

That withdrawal followed an American strike on an Iranian naval vessel near Sri Lanka, which expanded the perceived theatre of risk far beyond the Gulf itself. The Indian Ocean entered the calculation. Washington offered convoys and insurance. The offer did not translate into a functioning system. The market had already adjusted. Iran moved within that space. It did not need to formally close anything. The disruption was already in motion.

From this angle, the familiar claim that Iran has closed the Strait begins to look imprecise. The closure is better understood as the outcome of a sequence in which the United States helped create the conditions for systemic risk.

Who is at the centre of this risk? China. It is the principal importer of oil and gas through Hormuz, along with a range of other inputs that are less visible but no less essential. Strategic reserves provide a buffer, but they are not designed for a prolonged interruption at this scale.

Meanwhile, alternative routes from the Gulf offer limited reassurance. Saudi Arabia’s pipelines to the Red Sea reduce reliance on Hormuz but introduce new vulnerabilities. The Houthi movement has already demonstrated its capacity to disrupt traffic in the Red Sea and the Suez corridor.

Who is the immediate winner? RUSSIA

So, what will happen? Russia will come back into the scene stronger. It looks like the most immediate beneficiary of this crisis.

A-ha x 3!

Beijing is deepening its energy relationship with Russia, revisiting plans for another pipeline and the expansion of Arctic LNG routes that bypass Hormuz.

So, a China–Russia axis, bound more tightly by necessity. Others, including much of Europe, navigating between them. Europe is unfortunately more dependent on American LNG due to the Ukraine war. To reduce exposure to Middle Eastern instability by increasing reliance on the United States is to exchange one dependency for another. Similarly, a return to Russian energy would resolve one problem and create another.

The United States’ position is ambiguous. As a major energy producer, it is less exposed than in earlier crises. As a strategic actor, it is taking on a different kind of risk. If the disruption is indeed part of a broader attempt to constrain China’s energy security, the outcome will depend on whether that pressure can be sustained without triggering a wider economic contraction.

The result is a more fractured energy world. It used to be that shocks in one region could be absorbed elsewhere with relative ease. Not anymore.

The question, then, is no longer when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen. It is whether the system that made its openness seem natural can be restored at all. So, as Thompson says, there will never be that kind of normality from now on. As history suggests, once these arrangements break, they do not easily return. Sometimes they do not return at all.

To listen to Thompson’s podcast, here is the link. There is also this valuable piece, you might want to read, The Narrow Strait of Hormuz and its Long Winding History by Aman Narain.

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There once was the assassination of a Ferdinand, if you might remember. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We all know the spiralling conflicts and the great war that came after. The crises that ensued led to a war that reordered the balance across Europe and beyond. One act, and a sequence no one could fully contain. A historical juncture that changed the power configurations of the world.

Since then, there was, for a long time, a tacit understanding that assassinating another country’s leader was considered off limits, not out of restraint but out of calculation, the expectation of tit-for-tat escalation.

That restraint has weakened. The US and Israel increasingly act as if they are beyond this tacit consensus and have been using decapitation as a foreign policy tool for almost two decades now. The killing of Osama bin Laden, the US drone strike campaign against al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere. Israel’s ‘targeted killing’ campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah (I had written about the effects of Nasrallah’s killing by Israel on Hezbollah two years ago in this post) and Iran.

Since the 2003 Iraq war and the advancement of military technologies, the normative bar has wobbled and our understanding of what is permissible morally has been stretched thin by repetitive traumas and the exhaustion that comes from the unaccountability and impunity of belligerent men.

We have been watching a genocide, famine, massacres of children in part or in whole in Palestine. Would we be surprised and shocked, and question the legality and or the morality of the decapitation of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iranian leaders? We would not. We might not even flinch if one leader, I am not naming names, began speaking of sending another leader’s severed ear in an envelope to NATO. This is where we are. This is the mafiaisation of our daily political language.

But let me tell you this. Decapitation is not right, in most cases it is not legal and its outcome is rarely predictable.

Israel stated on Monday that it had killed another senior regime figure, security chief Ali Larijani. A central figure within the Iranian political establishment, involved in the 2015 nuclear negotiations that led to the agreement between Iran and the United States. A committed ideologue of the regime, yet also a philosopher who worked on Kant and Descartes. He personally known to Western diplomats and might have reappeared as a negotiator if the war moved towards de-escalation. He was killed a few days after appearing in the streets of Tehran, surrounded by crowds, giving a live interview on state television about the resilience and moral superiority of Iranian people.

I believe neither the slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei nor Larijani were naïve enough to think that Israel would not target them. Experts believe that the reason they did not hide underground was partly because there was no end to hiding and, secondly, because martyrdom is part of the culture of the Iranian revolution. They must have believed that their death by Israeli drones would serve as a glue for the regime elements left behind.

The literature on decapitation as a useful strategy is mixed and the research usually focuses on non-state actors targeted as part of counterterrorism strategy. One study claims1 that decapitation is not an effective counterterrorism strategy and is frequently counterproductive. Its central claim is that a terrorist group’s resilience to decapitation is determined by two variables: bureaucratisation and communal support. Bureaucratised organisations have clear divisions of labour, established rules and routines, and diversified resource bases. These features make them far less dependent on any single leader, enabling smoother succession and continued functioning after a leadership strike. Older and larger groups tend to be more bureaucratised and are therefore harder to destabilise.

Communal support matters because it sustains recruitment, funding, covert operations, and ideological relevance. Religious and separatist groups tend to enjoy higher communal support than ideological ones, since their doctrines are reproducible independently of any particular leader. Heavy-handed counterterrorism tactics, including drone strikes that cause civilian casualties, can perversely increase this support.

In conclusion, decapitation may produce short-term disruption but risks counterproductive consequences: martyrdom effects, retaliatory attacks, recruitment surges, and the emergence of more radical successors.

Iranian state identity is rooted in the “Karbala paradigm”, a theological framework that reframes military defeat and death as a transcendent victory (shahid). This makes traditional deterrence difficult, as escalation often leads to deeper entrenchment rather than submission.

The Shia understanding of martyrdom rests on the seventh-century struggles at the heart of early Islam, above all the deaths of Ali and his son Husayn. Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, is regarded by Shia Muslims as the rightful first imam, whose rule was cut short by assassination. Husayn, his son, was killed in 680 at Karbala after refusing to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad caliph Yazid, a ruler widely seen in Shia tradition as embodying unjust and illegitimate power. It is this confrontation, between Husayn’s small band and Yazid’s forces, that becomes the moral template: resistance against tyranny even in the face of certain defeat. Ayatollah Khomeini reworked this narrative into a modern political language, casting the Shah as a contemporary Yazid and embedding revolt within the obligations of belief. The premise was stark. Faced with despotism, the faithful must be prepared to rise and, if necessary, to die, regardless of the odds. During the Iran–Iraq War, this moved from idiom to institution through the Basij, where teenage volunteers such as Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh were elevated into icons of sacrifice. From the outside, particularly within Western realist frameworks, this logic is often misread. Deterrence assumes a shared fear of loss. Here, loss can be recoded as transcendence, death as passage rather than defeat. To provoke a state shaped by this tradition is to risk reactivating a machinery of martyrdom capable of absorbing devastation and outlasting internal strain.

In a similar vein, continued decapitations may remove individuals but risk creating “nuclear warlords” seizing dispersed assets and the creation of a “jihadist highway” for groups like ISIS-K.

Another study2 asks a prior and somewhat neglected question: how do states actually decide to assassinate in the first place? The article ranges across five centuries of foreign policy assassination, from Venetian statecraft to the Obama drone programme.

The first and most common logic behind the decision of assassination is driven by the assumption that a replacement would be more compliant. One of the clearest instances occurred between 1948 and 1953, when Joseph Stalin repeatedly plotted to assassinate Josip Broz Tito, convinced that Yugoslavia would then be led by officials more amenable to Moscow.3 More broadly, this reflects a strategy of targeting a rival state’s elite in the belief that their successors, once in power, would pursue policies aligned against their own government’s interests and in favour of the intervening state. In the end, decisions to pursue assassination are often driven by a largely unsubstantiated belief that no successor could be worse than the current figure, and that whoever follows might well prove better.4

Really? Are we sure that the successor would be more preferable? Why, for how long and by whose standards?

Because assassination violates widely held norms, deliberations are confined to very small circles, which excludes relevant expertise and prevents rigorous analysis of consequences. The CIA’s Fidel Castro plots went forward for years without the analytical directorate being informed. The consequences of killing him were assessed twice in formal reports that the plotters never read. Second, cognitive bias: leaders facing difficult value trade-offs tend to simplify problems so that the need for choice appears to disappear. They persuade themselves that killing a leader will simultaneously deter terrorism, weaken the enemy organisation, and strengthen the peace process. They also systematically personalise adversary states, attributing hostile foreign policy entirely to the individual in power rather than to institutional or structural forces. This leads to persistent overestimation of what assassination can accomplish.

The resulting default logic is the “no one could be worse, anyone might be better” assumption, which allows decision-makers to proceed without seriously analysing the successor’s likely identity or orientation. The Dominican Republic, Libya, and the attempts on Saddam Hussein all illustrate this pattern.

Think about someone whose father and mother have been killed by a force ingrained in their head and identity as the ultimate tyrant. Would that person be “better” than his father? He might be, but better for whom and in what sense? These are the questions that now surround Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, reportedly wounded in the same attack.

The bin Laden raid is treated as the best-conducted case in the historical record, precisely because it avoided the most common analytical trap. Policymakers made no assumptions about al-Qaeda’s future leadership or whether a successor would be more moderate. The goal was elimination for past deeds and emotional closure after September 11, which reduced the cognitive complexity of the decision. The process was also unusually inclusive, with a wide range of senior officials present at the final deliberation.

The drone campaign, by contrast, represents a different and more troubling trajectory. Drone strikes are structurally attractive to decision-makers because they are cheap, deniable, and carry lower domestic political risk than invasion. Over time, the CIA and JSOC developed separate kill lists with different criteria and minimal coordination. The paper argues that the underlying analytical problems, especially the unresolved question of whether leadership targeting actually works, have never been seriously engaged by the officials ordering the strikes.

In the end, the practice persists without a clear evidentiary basis, while its strategic and political costs remain insufficiently scrutinised. What is more troubling is how routine it has become.

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A few reasons for that.

First, Iran also wants to escalate it to a degree that each and every country in the Middle East feels battered enough that they would do everything in their power to impede another cycle in six months. There have already been two missiles directed at Turkey’s US and NATO bases, both of which were intercepted. What happens, mazallah, if there is a third?

Second, if the war continues at this speed or turns into a protracted conflict between Iran and Israel, there will be a wave of migration from Iran to Turkey, which would make Turkey surely a part of the war as the most stable neighbour.

And finally, and most importantly, Turkey is part of this war because Israel wants it, is intent on it. And in this environment of impunity, Israel can take steps that many of us would say, “They would not go that far.” Oh yes they can. Oh yes they would. We are talking about a regime that has multiple fronts of conflict and a genocide on its hands.

Now let me explain this.

A couple of weeks ago, Netanyahu told his cabinet that Israel was working to build a regional alliance to counter what he described as two hostile axes, a hardline Shia axis and an emerging hardline Sunni axis. The proposed alliance would include India, Arab and African countries, Greece, Cyprus and other Asian states. The Shia axis needs little introduction at this point, I believe.

It is what remains of what was once called the axis of resistance. Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen. A network of Iranian-backed forces that has been systematically dismantled over the past two years, first by Israel’s campaign in Lebanon and Gaza, then by Assad’s fall, and now by the war on Iran itself. Netanyahu is telling his cabinet, and the world, that having dealt with one axis, he is already naming the next.

Who leads the Sunni axis in his framing? Turkey. Alongside Qatar, Syria, and arguably Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Netanyahu, as we know by now, does not make off-hand remarks. Countering the so-called Sunni axis is a strategic declaration.

Furthermore, Netanyahu is not alone in making it. We have enough information by now that this strategic vision is shared across the political spectrum and establishment figures. One example is the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who is widely expected to run in Israel’s elections this autumn. He recently said at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in February that Turkey is emerging as a threat and should be viewed and dealt with as the new Iran. He said it with the cadence of a prepared line, pausing for applause before adding that Erdoğan is sophisticated, dangerous, and seeks to encircle Israel.

Bennett accused Turkey of trying to flip Saudi Arabia against Israel, of building a hostile Sunni axis with nuclear Pakistan, and of creating what he called a new choke ring with Syria and Gaza. Israel’s foreign minister went further still, posting in Turkish on X to accuse Erdoğan of being antisemitic and a threat to the region, urging NATO allies to take notice. Bennett repeated a similar narrative in an interview just a couple of days ago, claiming that ‘we need to ensure that Erdogan does not create an alliance of radical Islam.’

This is a sustained, coordinated campaign and it is worth being precise about what it is not. It is not an accurate description of Erdoğan’s Turkey. Of Erdoğan himself either. Erdoğa can be many things, but he is not the radical Islamist that Netanyahu purposefully portrays to attract the support of Islamophobic and Orientalist American decision makers, which probably describes 80 percent of that crowd. Erdoğan presides over a clientelist, oligarchic system with an increasingly authoritarian state apparatus, but calling him a radical Islamist is deliberately idiotic.

However, Erdoğan’s genuine enmity toward Netanyahu is well documented. He has said publicly that Israel is waging a genocide in Gaza and that it constitutes a terrorist threat. Those words were not empty, yani, they carried not only his real feelings but also the intention of giving his base the idea that he is standing up to Israel and morally superior. If only it meant anything. Because in material terms, trade between Turkey and Israel continued well into the conflict, and back-channel talks between the two governments persisted in ways that disappointed many of Erdoğan’s former base, those who still carry the expectations of an Islamist political project.

Like I tried to explain above, there is no Islamist project in Erdoğan’s game. I have not described Erdoğan’s AKP as Islamist for some time. If Islamism as an ideology had eyes and ears and looked at Erdoğan, it would not recognise him as one of its own.

But I agree that what he and his party represent is harder to pin down. An authoritarian right-wing ideology without a thick ideological core, malleable enough to resist easy categorisation, but closest, if one must label it, to nationalism with a Muslim conservative leitmotif. The nuances of this do not particularly matter for the Israeli political establishment. What matters is the utility of the framing.

That is why the accusation that Erdoğan is a radical Islamist, that Turkey under his leadership is a state sponsor of Hamas, that it represents a civilisational threat analogous to Iran, has been circulating for two years on Israeli television channels close to the government, in op-eds, in conference speeches.

The intent here, and I think the Erdoğan government has quietly understood this, is to manufacture a confrontation. To provoke Turkey into a response that can then be used to justify treating it as a hostile state.

Because it is simple logic. Israel sees itself as already having a dominant position in the region, so it will not want any country to challenge that in the future. And with Turkey’s greater influence in Syria and overtures in Africa, it does look like a thorn in Israel’s side. Especially with someone like Erdoğan, even though he has proved to be the most pragmatic leader in the region. Erdoğan can be pragmatic. Netanyahu much less so.

Turkey has so far met that provocation with considerable restraint. AKP spokesperson Ömer Çelik said this week that the Turkish government was closely watching statements by Israeli politicians who directly target Turkey, that it was under no obligation to respond to each one individually, and that it sees the bad faith behind them clearly. He also said something that deserves attention beyond the immediate context. That the world as we knew it is coming to an end, that the rules are changing, and that Turkey will take precautions and make its preparations.

Yes, Turkey is not in this war in the conventional sense. No Turkish soldier is fighting, no Turkish base has been used. Yes. But as I am trying to explain, it is part of this war in a deeper sense. Israel’s strategic vision, now stated openly, requires a submissive Turkey or a destabilised one. A Turkey that controls Syria’s transition, that has resolved its Kurdish question on its own terms, that maintains an independent foreign policy and harbours genuine hostility toward Netanyahu. That Turkey is incompatible with the regional order Israel is trying to construct. Because Netanyahu’s Israel is not hegemonic in the Gramscian sense but seeks domination.

The question is not whether Turkey will be drawn further into this war. The question is through which mechanism, and on whose terms.

The answer may come sooner than Turkey expects. Because the next front in Israel’s regional strategy is already open and it runs on two paths.

One goes through the Eastern Mediterranean, creating and leading Greece and Cyprus in a configuration that would pit them against Turkey in the energy theatre of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The other goes through the Kurds. The East Med card will mature further down the line. The Kurdish card, however…

The Kurdish Card Has Already Been Played

Kurds have been coerced by a fait accompli into an impossible situation, which I tried to convey in the conversation I had for Turkey Recap. I find it extremely important to understand, so I will explain.

On Saturday, Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had ruled out Kurdish involvement in the Iran war. “We’re very friendly with the Kurds,” he said, “but we don’t want to make the war any more complex than it already is.” The reversal came swiftly after what I am told was direct pressure from Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Turkish government made clear that Kurdish involvement was a red line.

Many read this as a resolution. I beg to differ. I’m afraid it may be the beginning of a much more dangerous chapter for the Kurds, and understanding why requires going back to the moment the card was first played.

The CIA had been in discussions with Iranian Kurdish groups for months before the war began, working to arm them with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising inside Iran. When the bombing started, Trump called Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani, the heads of the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions, and signalled enthusiasm for their ground involvement. Then came the CNN report framing Kurdish groups as prospective boots on the ground for a US-Israeli operation to topple the Iranian regime.

I believe that leak was deliberate. By publicly announcing that the Kurds would fight alongside Israel and the United States against Tehran, they placed Iranian Kurds in an impossible position before they had agreed to anything. Yani, the announcement does the coercion for you.

Look at what Kurdish leaders actually said in response when the leak happened. Not one of them expressed eagerness to serve as Israel and the United States’ boots on the ground. Not one said they would do it. The Kurdish movement, across all four parts of the region, is one of the most politically astute and strategically experienced actors in the Middle East. They know this script. They have lived it.

Also, you do not need to be sophisticated to track the pattern. The US instrumentalised Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and then stood aside during the independence referendum in 2017, making the vote meaningless. Again, in Syria, the US could have pushed harder with both the Turkish government and Damascus to preserve at least some form of autonomous administration in Hasakah and Kobane. It did not. So the Kurds in Iran are not naive about what is being offered.

Trump himself had said when asked a month ago why the US abandoned the Kurds in Syria after they had fought against ISIS. He said the Kurds “were paid, had earned tremendous amounts of money. We gave them oil and other things. They did it for themselves.” In Trump’s thinking, Kurds would be soldiers hired for money if they were to fight against the Iranian regime.

Kurds understand this logic. But the problem is that understanding it does not give them an alternative now. They have been placed in a situation not of their making, and that situation has made them extraordinarily vulnerable, not only to the Iranian regime but also to Iranian nationalism, and at some point to Turkish nationalism more broadly.

This is worth dwelling on. Iranians are a deeply nationalist people. They take pride in never having been colonised after the First World War. They carry a deep-rooted anxiety about foreign powers conspiring to dismember their country. When the US and Israel publicly name Kurdish groups as the force that will topple Tehran, they are inscribing the Kurds into a narrative of foreign conspiracy that millions of Iranians tend to believe.

The consequences of this are already visible on social media. The grievances being generated within Iranian society toward Kurds, including among nationalists in the diaspora and supporters of Reza Pahlavi, will outlast this war considerably.

Now consider what Trump’s reversal actually changes on the ground. Iranian Kurdish armed groups, numbering around ten thousand men, are based in northern Iraq along the Iraq-Iran border. Iran has already been striking them, describing them as anti-revolutionary separatist forces. Trump and Netanyahu, by publicly signalling their intention to work with the Kurds, handed Tehran a justification for exactly this kind of military campaign, one Iran can now pursue under the cover of counterterrorism and regime security whenever it deems necessary, regardless of what Trump says.

The cruel logic here is that the Kurds may now need the very protection the leaked plan promised. There are already rumours that some Kurdish factions have asked for precisely that, US or Israeli cover against prospective Iranian strikes.

And if Iran presses its campaign against PJAK in northern Iraq, this will not stay contained. It will create serious problems for and within the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, who cannot remain neutral indefinitely as Iranian missiles land in their territory.

There is a Turkish dimension here as well. PJAK is the Iranian affiliate of the PKK. Turkey is currently in the middle of a fragile peace process with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, one premised on a shared threat perception centred on Israeli regional expansion. The Turkish government has worked hard to keep that process insulated from regional turbulence. Fidan’s call to Rubio was part of that effort. But if PJAK is drawn into the conflict on the American and Israeli side, the geometry of that bargain changes in ways that will be very difficult to reverse.

The Kurds did not ask to be dealt this hand. They rarely do. What is particular to this moment is the speed with which the exposure was created and the breadth of it, military, political, and social simultaneously. A group that has spent decades trying to build legitimate political standing in a region that has consistently denied its birth rights and identity as Kurds has been thrust, without consent, into the centre of a war.

I am afraid unplaying this card would require exceptional leadership. I am not sure the Kurds have that person right now.

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We go on asking why these two men, Trump and Netanyahu, waged a war against Iran. Surely we have moved beyond the claim that Iran posed an imminent threat (it did not), or that it was building a nuclear bomb with its “completely obliterated” nuclear facilities during the so called 12-day war (they were not). The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, recently stated that inspectors have found no evidence of a coordinated Iranian programme to build nuclear weapons.

So we are left with a narrower set of possibilities. Either regime change in Iran. Or outright chaos, sustained long enough for Israel to manipulate the balance of power, perhaps even to engage in territorial opportunism if circumstances permit. But how would that be achieved? There are numerous examples showing how difficult it is to produce …

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In politically charged communities, the interpretive charity, yani the willingness to read what someone actually wrote rather than to verify which side they are on, has largely collapsed. When people are sufficiently certain of who their enemies are, they no longer read. They search for confirmation if you are among them. It is as old as the polis. So we move on. With those who listen, and for them.

I spent a tiresome week battling the label 'jihadi-lover' (meaning, apparently, a sympathiser of Ahmad al-Sharaa or his HTS, I don’t know) after publishing my field observations from Damascus and appearing on a YouTube politics programme to discuss them. A group who claim to follow my work on the Kurdish issue were deeply disappointed. Apparently my reporting from Syria had made me look like one.

How so? I asked with a genuine, if fleeting, hope that perhaps I had said something intellectually interesting. But n…

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Don’t we all?!

When we look at the so-called international liberal order, with the US as its main anchor, what do we see? A crony, clientelist system revolving around the abuse of young girls and women. A system which, as Nancy Fraser argues in Cannibal Capitalism, in a way feeds on the flesh of women. Across social negotiations, cultures and nations, subtle or conspicuous, the patriarchal mindset continues to determine what women can do, cannot do, must do and must not do.

A panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council recently concluded that the crimes revealed in the Epstein files showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls,” they wrote, “that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”

So yes, women in Syria need ‘saving’. So do women anywhere else. The problem lies …

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Not because the damage is invisible. It is not. The buildings are tired, the infrastructure worn down, the economy clearly strained after civil war, sanctions and foreign intervention. But the streets were alive in a way I had not expected.

Yani there was movement. Noise. Shops open late. Traffic impatient – horrible is another word- as ever. A kind of ordinary insistence on daily life. It did not erase what the Assad dynasty had done to this country. Nothing erases that. But it interrupted the narrative of paralysis that so often frames Syria from the outside.

I believe the resilience of Syrians is a lesson worth listening to.

From afar, the story is still written in extremes. A former jihadist now leads the transitional government. Depending on who is sp…

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We witness a murder carried out by a state official, and are told by senior ministers that it was an act of self-defence against a man - an emergency nurse- lying flat on the floor. We saw this in Minnesota.

This is a time lifted straight from the canon of political dystopias. A time of euphemisms pushed to the edge of absurdity, to the point where we seriously begin to question our own sanity. We have been seeing this in Gaza.

We are told there is a ceasefire, and yet we continue to hear otherwise.

For the past two and a half years we have been systematically gaslighted by Israeli officials and IDF spokespersons. We were instructed not to trust figures or narratives coming from Gazan authorities. We were to…

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The Balfour Declaration was drafted in the glow of wartime idealism and the shadow of imperial ambition. In 1917 Britain promised support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, imagining it as both an act of justice and a stroke of strategy. Yet the lone Jewish member of the Cabinet, Edwin Samuel Montagu, opposed it with fierce clarity, warning that Zionism would endanger Jews rather than redeem them. His dissent, soon drowned out by triumphal politics, reveals how the language of sympathy can conceal hierarchy and how the moral debts of Europe, left unpaid, still shape the politics of the present. In a previous post, I had promised to return to the Balfour Declaration in greater depth, and I now turn to one of the most meticulous accounts of its making and aftermath, The Balfour Declaration by historian Jonathan Schneer.

In November 1917, as the First World War ground thr…

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The Syrian Kurds, their military wing the SDF/YPG and their political arm, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), have suffered a severe strategic breakdown over the past couple of weeks. A cascade of serious miscalculations, the fraying of key internal alliances, and a sharply transformed regional context combined to produce the swift loss of nearly 80 percent of their territory and the disintegration of their autonomy project.

As I have pointed out before, the main mistake was a misreading of the post-Assad moment. The Kurdish leadership underestimated al-Sharaa’s legitimacy bargain with the US and entered talks with the new Syrian government on rigid terms, while inflating the reliability of American backing and discounti…

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I had the privilege of watching writer and actor Khalid Abdalla’s autobiographical one-man play Nowhere at the Oxford Playhouse. Contrary to its name, the play, using unexpected but marvellous tools of modern theatre, took us everywhere that is politically relevant to our understanding of who we are.

We as friends. We as revolutionaries. We as failed political agents. We as political prisoners. We as immigrants. We as forced immigrants, our countries rendered unliveable under authoritarian regimes and neoliberal miasma. We as asylum seekers fleeing civil war and genocide. We as hopefuls and optimists. We as citizens of everywhere and therefore, as right-wing populists want us to believe, “nowhere.”

Abdalla, an Egyptian born and raised in Glasgow, showed us during the pl…

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A scenario long feared is now beginning to unfold.

Syrian government troops advances deeper into areas held by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, pressing rapid gains against Kurdish fighters who vowed to defend their remaining enclaves.

A brief ceasefire has been declared, meant to allow the Kurds to hand control of Hasakah to government forces — or else.

How did we end up in this grim situation?

The Syrian Army, whatever it consists of, has moved to push Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds, to relinquish control first over the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah in Aleppo and then over the Arab-majority cities of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. Before advancing militarily, the Syrian president made a ca…

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Iranians have been protesting since the last days of 2025, with demonstrations spreading to more than 70 locations. What began in places like the Grand Bazaar, initially sparked by everyday economic shocks, the sudden collapse of the currency, the price of basic goods such as eggs reportedly jumping by 300 percent in a single day, scale shifted, to borrow the language of contentious politics, into a nationwide revolt. It now involves all segments of society, though it is driven above all by the young, teenagers from 15 upwards, who have taken to the streets fully aware of the risks involved.

Iranian people, whom I believe to be among the bravest and most dignified, have taken to the streets again, know…

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• Oily Face of Mandate Era

• The Political Trap: The Rentier State

• The Honeypot: Corruption and Conflict

• Regional Context: The Middle East

• Conflict and Foreign Meddling

• Other Perilous Developments in the Region: Iran and Syria

The digital zeitgeist of Turkey is perpetually haunted by the aphorism coğrafya kaderdir (geography is destiny). It is invoked with such frequency that it now colors a wide range of observations, from the ironies of a decimated rule of law and non-existent free speech to the idiosyncratic dietary preferences of Istanbul’s street cats, who seemingly prefer a tasty plate of kuru fasulye-pilav ( over any proper kibble.

This expression is typically deployed to emphasize that had a person, institution, or concept been nourished elsewhere, their trajectory would have been characterized by superior health, wealth, and opportunity. While the phrase has been somewhat diluted by the wry, cynical humor of Turkish social media, it remains firmly anchored in a national psyche where th…

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This is the last post of the year, and the last one before Christmas. It feels dishonest and irresponsible to end it with a gesture of closure, resolution, or uplift. The year itself has resisted all three with remarkable consistency. As the famous Turkish football coach Fatih Terim puts it, in his inimitable Turkish-English: “What can I do, sometimes?”

A Global Condition, Not a Regional Pathology

Gaza, in particular, has functioned over the past year or so as a site of moral exposure, revealing not only the limits but the exhaustion of international law as a meaningful constraint on state violence.

Elsewhere in the region, crises persist in quieter but no less consequential forms: the long-stalled question of Hezbollah’s integration into the Lebanese army continues to hollow out the Lebanese state from within; in Egypt,…

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My Great Arab Melancholy, Lamia Ziadé
Ziadé brings an unusual combination to the modern Arab story: the eye of a visual artist, the memory of someone raised amid the Lebanese Civil War, and the discipline of a researcher who has spent years tracing the region’s political and emotional ruptures. The result is a memoir-archive hybrid where illustrations carry as much weight as the prose, and where the history of Beirut, Jerusalem, Cairo and Baghdad is told through the derailed ambitions that shaped them. She writes with quiet fury about imperial interventions and the long afterlife of Palestine’s dispossession while remaining attentive to the revolutionary imagination that once animated the Arab world. I recommend it because it gives readers a way to feel the history without drowning in sentiment. It is also an exquisitely made book, the kind you end up keeping out on the table.

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**Here is War of Succession, Vol. 1, published at the end of October, titled “All Eyes on These Two Turkish Men: Hakan Fidan vs. İbrahim Kalın.”

We would not be surprised by incidents that expose the hypocrisy of a famous journalist, or by rumours revealing that a well-known figure is immersed in worlds of drugs and debauchery. That is fine most of the time. One’s private life is none of our concern. Yani, who cares, to be honest.

On the other hand, we have become increasingly accustomed, thankfully as women gather the courage to speak out, to hearing allegations of sexual harassment and workplace bullying against powerful presenters, editors, and reporters. They turn our stomachs, and we note them down as examples of power corruption in newsrooms and of toxic masculinity.

An arrest that took place in Turkey last week fits both of these patterns, yet it also carries …

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The way we explain a situation usually shapes it, and when that situation is a conflict that demands resolution, our explanatory frame often predetermines the kind of solution we deem possible.

With that in mind, I look at the past year, the first after Assad’s fall following more than a decade of civil war and many more decades of dynastic oppression. It is not a brilliant year. Communal strife persists, nearly fifteen hundred people were killed in a massacre, and there is still no concrete prospect of building democratic institutions anchored in an inclusive constitution.

Yet this is expected. Transitional periods rarely deliver instant progress. The chances of last year being better than it was were always slim, and it could easily have been much worse. Far worse.

The pragmatism and …

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The contours of the latest Kurdish negotiation process were drawn a year ago when the nationalist Devlet Bahçeli unexpectedly launched it, yet the pressures of the moment now render these features far more visible.

Followers of Angle, Anchor and Voice would by now know that I argued this process was shaped as a prophylactic step in the face of Israel’s expansionist posture and the changing regional landscape after 7th October and the fall of Assad. I cannot stress enough how central this point is for understanding what is unfolding in Syria and the recent contest, or more aptly friction, betwee…

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