6:30 pm, Istanbul time

Turkish warplanes reportedly have conducted a bombing raid on suspected PKK camps in northern Iraq. According to reports, the raid started at 3 am last night and continued for approximately one hour. The raid has reportedly
started a fairly large forest fire.



Meanwhile, Syria has arrested over 400 people for having suspected links with the PKK. As I mention below, the Turkish government has recently made a similar request to American and Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq.

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Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan spoke today at a massive memorial service taking place today in Bosnia for a massive memorial service taking place in honor of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre. Erdogan's comments can be found here.

In related news, police searching the home of fugitive general Ratko Mladic have found a huge amount of diaries, movies, and other documents belonging to Mladic, and which seem to implicate the government of Serbia to a degree which had previously been suspected in the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, but never proven.

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12:10 pm

Finally rolled into town at around 3 am last night after an epic (well, very long) trip from St. Petersburg. Scroll down for today's N&P...


It's good to be back in the City of the Sultans

I saw an interesting AP article in the Washington Post the other day on the clean-up taking place in a village in Kyrgyzstan where Meskhetian Turks had come under attack in April of this year. When googling the piece I found this other article, published immediately after the events, which shows a more complicated picture than the "ethnic hatreds" line you see in the Post article.  

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Turkey has asked the US and the northern Iraq government to hand over about 250 people that the Turkish government has identified as PKK members. As I mentioned in a post last week, the Turkish government has been hinting in recent weeks that it might be prepared to launch another military incursion into northern Iraq to take out PKK bases.

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Bosnians are commemorating the Srebrenica massacre, which occured fifteen years ago this month.

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Al-jazeera reports that a Greek journalist is being sued for libel after stating in a documentary that about 150 Greek fighters participated in the Srebrenica massacre with tacit government approval.

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The Jamestown spooks report on human rights violations, and the recent activities of some human rights organizations, in the northern Caucasus region of the Russian Federation—specifically Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria.

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The number of tourists visiting Turkey from Arab countries has risen by almost 50 percent in the last year. As Juan Cole mentions in a recent post , Arab tourism to Turkey will take a lot of the bite out of an expected drop in tourists from Israel.