Turkey’s Lost Treasure: Story of a Soldier and Lebanese Turkmen Community (By Joe Hammoura)

It wasn’t until 1989 when a Lebanese soldier was overheard speaking Turkish words by his commander that Turkey found out about the existence of a Turkmen community in Lebanon. The soldier coming from the small village of Qawashra in Northern Lebanon and identified

Turkish Foreign Policy Under the AKP Rule: The Limited Role of Turkey in Lebanon (By Joe Hammoura)

ABSTRACT During the last decade, Turkish foreign policy exhibited a heightened interest in the Middle East thereby inaugurating a sharp departure from a long foreign policy tradition which relegated the region to the backwater. The conspicuous examples of this shift are Turkey’s keen

The Nineveh Plains and the Future of Minorities in Iraq (By Yousif Kalian)

When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stormed northern Iraq and took over Mosul in the summer of 2014, it ran a parallel campaign of genocide against the minorities of the Nineveh Plains. For many of these groups, including Christians and

Rojava or Northern Syria? (By Cihad Hammy)

On 27 December in the town of Rmeilan (Rimelan), the Northern Syria Constituent Assembly voted to remove “Rojava,” meaning ‘Western (Kurdistan), from the federal system; initially named the “Democratic Federal System of Northern Syria-Rojava and now called the “Democratic Federal System of Northern