Contents: Thousands of refugees leave Libya for Italy, hundreds drown; Turkey’s president Erdogan tells Muslims not to use birth control; Population growth rate of Muslims and Christians
Contents: Arab countries seek to overturn the century old Sykes-Picot agreement; Syria: A victim of colonial politics; Palestine: Sykes-Picot and Balfour Declaration left a ‘savage legacy’; Lebanon: Survived Sykes-Picot largely intact
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has not been in full control of his country since the Syrian uprising began in 2011. The dictator has been having trouble securing territory from the Islamic State and the witches brew of moderate and extremist rebels that have set up strongholds throughout the country.
The Jerusalem Post reports: Rare, 150-year-old maps of Jerusalem from a British Army operative during the Ottoman Empire, constituting “the basis for the modern understanding and recognition of Jerusalem,” were sold at auction on Sunday for NIS 13,000. The maps in
Turkey’s Women’s Library and Information Center Foundation plans to celebrate their 25th anniversary by preserving their priceless collection digitally. Organizers say the promotion of women’s arts is pivotal in a country with an alarming, and growing, problem of violence against women.
Persecution in Turkey has forced many of the 45,000 Christians, who fled the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) in Iraq and Syria, to hide their true identities and pretend to be Muslim.
Contents: EU votes to distribute 120,000 refugees among countries by quota; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán invokes memories of Ottoman Empire
Armenian families who fled Kobane, Syria, do not plan to return home even though the Kurdish army successfully defeated the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). “There were only eight families left before the ISIL attack [in October 2014],” explained Agop Tomasyon. “All of these families left Kobane after the attack.”
Contents: Al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab launches massive terrorist attack in Somalia; ISIS-linked terrorists attack Shia mosque in Kuwait City, killing 27; France in shock after beheading and attack at US-owned factory; Terrorist gunman creates bloodbath in Tunisia, killing 37; Analysis of Friday’s four terror attacks; China’s stock markets continue their free-fall
Mustafa Karaaslan, an education official in Bursa, Turkey, has triggered national outrage after his Twitter account posted a picture of Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in hell, presumably for being a secular leader, rather than an Islamist one.
On Tuesday, the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) destroyed the 200-year-old Maryam Khatoon Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, which the Ottoman Empire erected in 1821.
A statue of an Ottoman prince taking a selfie in the Turkish city of Amasya has become both a major tourist attraction and the victim of multiple vandalizations, as residents and tourists alike differ on whether the artwork is a fun homage to the city’s history or a vulgar commercialization of Turkish culture.
22 die in Macedonian police gun battles with Albanian militants; Very brief generational history of Albanian – Macedonian conflict; Former Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi’s son offers to make me rich
On April 24, 1915 the Ottoman Turkish leaders ordered the arrest of hundreds of notable Armenians in Istanbul and launched the systematic annihilation of Armenian as well as Assyrian Christians within the empire’s borders and throughout the Middle East. This day would become known as “Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day,” and a century later is the center of a persistent geopolitical controversy.
LOS ANGELES, California — Friday will mark the centennial of the start of the Armenian genocide, in which nearly 1.5 million Armenians were massacred at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. A host of businesses will be closing in the area in observance of the anniversary. A march through Los Angeles has also been planned.
The Christian population of Turkey is evaporating rapidly. The nation, a NATO member since 1952, has experienced a reduction in its Christian population from 20% 100 years ago to only 0.2% today. The latest blow in the community occurred at the Hagia Sophia during Easter holy week.
The Armenian genocide is a very sensitive subject with Turkey, as it prefers to think of that horrendous century-old bloodbath as a military clash with the Ottoman Empire, which the Armenians lost very badly–badly enough to kill about 1.5 million of the 2 million Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the time, to be specific.
The U.S. State Department wants a “full, frank” acknowledgement of the facts surrounding the mass killing of Armenians in World War I, but demurred when it came to labeling it “a genocide.”
The French UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) Party is facing controversy following the discovery that a large part of a bill presented to the French legislature in remembrance of the Armenian genocide was plagiarized from Wikipedia. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a member of the UMP.
Turkey and Armenia schedule conflicting WW I centennial commemorations; China continues its double-digit military spending increases
Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidates in Turkey, from regional positions to the Turkish legislature, are donning medieval Ottoman garb in their advertising campaigns, in an attempt to harken back to the strength of the Islamist Ottoman Empire.
Greece bailout talks collapse in acrimony; Egypt faces two-front war with airstrikes in Libya; Muslim versus Muslim wars in the Mideast continue to grow; Iraq army preparing to recapture Mosul from ISIS
As Armenians are gearing up to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has “mistakenly” published a picture of the Armenian Genocide Monument amidst a collage of photos in a 2015 calendar.