Tag Archives: Turkey

BRUSSELS: Turkey is “heading in the wrong direction” with its incursion into Syria and its deal with Russia to jointly patrol a “safe zone” there, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned Thursday. “Turkey put us all in a very terrible situation” by sweeping into northern Syria this month to fight ...

BRUSSELS: France’s president bemoaned Turkey’s offensive into northern Syria as “madness” and decried the North Atlantic Organisation’s (NATO) inability to react to the assault as a “serious mistake.” “I consider what’s happened in the last few days as a serious mistake from the West and NATO in the region and ...

ANKARA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan put US President Donald Trump’s letter “in the bin”, the BBC has been told. In the letter dated 9 October, and sent after US troops were pulled out of Syria, Mr Trump told Erdogan: “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” President ...

RAS AL-AIN: Kurdish fighters battled to defend a key Syrian border town from Turkish-backed forces in a flare-up of violence as US President Donald Trump sent his vice president and top diplomat to Ankara to demand a ceasefire. Russia, already the key foreign power in Syria, stepped into the void ...

ISTANBUL/ANKARA: Turkey pressed its military offensive against US-allied Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria, shelling towns and bombing targets from the air in an operation that has forced thousands of people to flee their homes. At least 23 fighters with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and eight civilians, two them ...

WASHINGTON: Ratings agency Fitch downgraded Turkey’s sovereign debt by one notch to ‘BB-‘ with a negative outlook, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sacked the governor of the central bank. The firing of Murat Cetinkaya last weekend for failing to follow government instructions “risks damaging already weak domestic confidence,” Fitch said ...

ISTANBUL: A refusal by the United States to hand over to Turkey the F-35 fighters jets which it has bought would be “robbery”, media reports on Thursday cited President Tayyip Erdogan as saying in a dispute over Ankara’s purchase of Russian air defences S-400. U.S. officials have told Reuters the Trump ...

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed that former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi didn’t die of natural causes, but that he was killed. During a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan cited as evidence that the deposed Egyptian president allegedly “flailed” in a Cairo courtroom for 20 minutes Monday and nobody ...

WASHINGTON: In a Thursday statement, the White House said it had terminated a preferential trade agreement with Turkey, finding the country no longer needed help as a developing country. However, the US did halve tariffs on Turkish steel from 50% to 25%. Noting that Turkey received the preferential treatment in 1975 ...

WASHINGTON: US will stop its manufacturing support for F-35 fighter jets in Turkey if Ankara continues to pursue plans to acquire Russian long-range S-400 surface-to-air missile systems,  acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan told reporters. “If Turkey decides that the S-400 is a decision they want to go forward with, then we have to move work out of Turkey”, he ...