U.S. citizen Mohamed Soltan freed from Egyptian prison

The Washington Post reports: Tears, tight hugs and cries of “Welcome home” greeted a frail American citizen on his sudden return to the United States on Saturday night after nearly two years spent in an Egyptian jail cell.

It was a surreal homecoming for Mohamed Soltan, 27, a citizen journalist and activist who survived a year-long hunger strike and a life sentence, only to be whisked from his cell and later onto a plane bound for Washington, the product of months of advocacy by his family and quiet, frantic negotiations between the U.S. government and Egypt, his family said.

Soltan, an Ohio State University graduate who was once chubby and energetic, entered the arrivals area of Dulles International Airport on Saturday night in a wheelchair, his frail frame quickly mobbed by family and cheering friends.

He clutched his 1-year-old nephew for the first time and the tears came. Then a fierce embrace from his sisters, and then came the sobs.

In a surprise move, Egyptian authorities on Saturday had quietly shuttled him onto an airplane and sent him home to be with his family in Virginia.

In April, a Cairo court sentenced Soltan to life in prison for his support of the protests that followed the group’s overthrow, including financing a weeks-long sit-in and “spreading false news” in his role as unofficial spokesman of the protest.

It was unclear what ultimately decided Soltan’s release. There was no court ruling to reverse his April sentence to life in prison and no formal announcement of clemency from Egypt’s president. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS destroys infamous Syria prison as regime bombing kills scores

AFP reports: Islamic State group jihadists demolished a notorious government prison in the historic Syrian city of Palmyra on Saturday, as barrel bombs dropped by regime helicopters killed more than 70 civilians in Aleppo.

In neighbouring Iraq, government forces retook an area west of the city of Ramadi, which IS overran earlier in May.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS planted explosives that “largely destroyed” the Palmyra jail, which was for decades a symbol of abuses meted out on regime opponents.

Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad welcomed on social media the destruction of the long-feared prison at Palmyra, which IS seized 10 days ago after government forces pulled out.

In rebel-held areas of Aleppo province including the city itself, “at least 71 civilians were killed, and dozens wounded when regime helicopters dropped barrel bombs,” the Observatory said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS skilled at gathering intelligence, adjusting tactics

VOA reports: While U.S. and coalition partners pluck intelligence on Islamic State extremists from the militants’ communications or movements and then bomb them from the air, the militant group is gathering its own intelligence from city streets and preparing the ground for its next battlefield moves.

The result, according to experts, is that Washington is consistently lagging behind in its effort to destroy the Islamic State group.

“We are about 60 to 90 days behind ISIS,” former intelligence officer and military adviser Michael Pregent told VOA, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms.

Last year when Washington finally paid attention to Mosul, Pregent said, the extremists were already planning their next move. And this pattern has repeated itself as IS has moved across Iraq: “We are now looking at Ramadi, and ISIS is looking ahead at pushing into Baghdad,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Pro-Iran militias take upper hand after U.S.-backed forces crumble in Anbar

The Washington Post reports: Iraqi forces have seized from Islamic State militants a string of hamlets and villages in the dust-choked desert southeast of Ramadi in recent days, closing in on the key city for a counteroffensive.

But the yellow-and-green flags that line the sides of the newly secured roads and flutter from rooftops leave no doubt as to who is leading the fighting here: Kitaeb Hezbollah, a Shiite militia designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Iraq’s two main allies — Iran and the United States — have vied for influence over Iraq’s battle to retake ground from Islamic State militants in the past year. While Iranian-linked Shiite militias have spearheaded the fight elsewhere, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army and counterterrorism units had been on the front lines in Anbar province, supported by an eight-month American-led air campaign.

But with the fall of Ramadi, the province’s capital, this month, paramilitary forces close to Iran are now taking the upper hand. They include groups such as Kitaeb Hezbollah, responsible for thousands of attacks on U.S. soldiers who fought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

Until recently, the Iraqi government had held back from ordering Iraq’s so-called popular mobilization units, a mix of Shiite militias and volunteers that formed last summer, to Anbar. Authorities were concerned that sending them to battle in a Sunni majority province could provoke sectarian conflicts. But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi dispatched them when regular forces crumbled in Ramadi and local politicians asked for the units’ help.

Now Shiite militias including the Badr Organization are pressing toward the city from the northeast, in an operation its commanders claim to be planning and leading. Meanwhile, a push to flank Ramadi from the southeast is dominated by Kitaeb Hezbollah. [Continue reading…]

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Rand Paul vows to force expiration of Patriot Act

The Washington Post reports: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) vowed that he would force the Patriot Act to expire Sunday when the Senate reconvenes after not taking action last week to extend or replace a controversial surveillance program.

“Tomorrow, I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program,” the Republican presidential candidate said in a statement, which was first reported by Politico.

The Senate will convene a rare Sunday session after it rejected a compromise bill on bulk surveillance by the National Security Agency last week. The bill would prohibit the government from engaging in the mass collection of phone records, but would leave those records in the hands of private telephone companies, which would keep them for 18 months. The Sunday session will take place hours before the Patriot Act expires.

Paul said Saturday that he would disrupt efforts to extend the Patriot Act or green light the compromise bill, known as the USA Freedom Act.

“I am ready and willing to start the debate on how we fight terrorism without giving up our liberty,” Paul said in the statement. “Sometimes when the problem is big enough, you just have to start over.”

Paul plans to prevent Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from expediting debate on the USA Freedom Act. Even if a vast majority of senators agree to extend some version of the Patriot Act, Senate rules would allow Paul to force about five days of debate over the issue, which would lead to a temporary halt to some techniques used by the nation’s spy agencies. [Continue reading…]

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Burma’s ugly Buddhists

The Daily Beast reports: Anti-Muslim protestors supported by Buddhist monks gathered in Burma’s main city of Rangoon this week to denounce the United Nations for “bullying” their country into accepting desperate migrants who have been stranded at sea in abandoned boats.

People waving multi-colored Buddhist flags led a column of several hundred marchers as they chanted slogans against the Rohingya minority who, with their distinct language and darker skin, are considered outsiders and denied citizenship in Burma, also known as Myanmar.

It was the latest in a series of Buddhist hate rallies in the country, a phenomenon that has become common here but has yet to penetrate the psyches of many westerners who associate saffron-robed monks with peace and compassion.

“Yes, we have compassion for all people in our Buddhism, but we have to protect ourselves against our enemies,” said Thuta Nanda, a monk, as people gathered with placards and t-shirts bearing slogans urging the international community to “Stop blaming Myanmar” for the boat crisis.

“In Buddhism, we want to help others,” added protester Htet Htet Soe Oo, “but Muslims are different, their religion teaches that they should kill us.”

If any group of people could benefit from the compassion that many associate with the teachings of the Buddha, it is Burma’s Rohingya Muslims. The group of roughly one million is almost completely friendless, widely despised inside predominantly Buddhist Burma and unwanted by neighboring countries. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. tried Stuxnet-style campaign against North Korea but failed

Reuters reports: The United States tried to deploy a version of the Stuxnet computer virus to attack North Korea’s nuclear weapons program five years ago but ultimately failed, according to people familiar with the covert campaign.

The operation began in tandem with the now-famous Stuxnet attack that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010 by destroying a thousand or more centrifuges that were enriching uranium. Reuters and others have reported that the Iran attack was a joint effort by U.S. and Israeli forces.

According to one U.S. intelligence source, Stuxnet’s developers produced a related virus that would be activated when it encountered Korean-language settings on an infected machine.

But U.S. agents could not access the core machines that ran Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, said another source, a former high-ranking intelligence official who was briefed on the program. [Continue reading…]

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The future of power: Going beyond coal

Michael Grunwald reports: The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.

The industry and its supporters use “war on coal” as shorthand for a ferocious assault by a hostile White House, but the real war on coal is not primarily an Obama war, or even a Washington war. It’s a guerrilla war. The front lines are not at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Supreme Court. If you want to see how the fossil fuel that once powered most of the country is being battered by enemy forces, you have to watch state and local hearings where utility commissions and other obscure governing bodies debate individual coal plants. You probably won’t find much drama. You’ll definitely find lawyers from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, the boots on the ground in the war on coal.

Beyond Coal is the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the Club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement. It’s gone largely unnoticed amid the furor over the Keystone pipeline and President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon, but it’s helped retire more than one third of America’s coal plants since its launch in 2010, one dull hearing at a time. With a vast war chest donated by Michael Bloomberg, unlikely allies from the business world, and a strategy that relies more on economics than ecology, its team of nearly 200 litigators and organizers has won battles in the Midwestern and Appalachian coal belts, in the reddest of red states, in almost every state that burns coal.

“They’re sophisticated, they’re very active, and they’re better funded than we are,” says Mike Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now heads the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “I don’t like what they’re doing; we’re losing a lot of coal in this country. But they do show up.”

Coal still helps keep our lights on, generating nearly 40 percent of U.S. power. But it generated more than 50 percent just over a decade ago, and the big question now is how rapidly its decline will continue. Almost every watt of new generating capacity is coming from natural gas, wind or solar; the coal industry now employs fewer workers than the solar industry, which barely existed in 2010. Utilities no longer even bother to propose new coal plants to replace the old ones they retire. Coal industry stocks are tanking, and analysts are predicting a new wave of coal bankruptcies.

This is a big deal, because coal is America’s top source of greenhouse gases, and coal retirements are the main reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined 10 percent in a decade. [Continue reading…]

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Spot the difference: Being or not being subject to mass surveillance

On Sunday night, at the stroke of midnight, will a shroud of fear be lifted from freedom-loving Americans?

Let’s assume that a last minute deal isn’t reached in Congress and the surveillance powers of the Patriot Act are indeed allowed to expire.

This might not amount to the kind of statutory protection of privacy that critics of the NSA have hoped for, and yet physically pulling the plug on the actual mechanisms of mass surveillance will highlight the difference between living in a world where all our information gets sucked into data warehouses and a world in which it remains a tad more secure under a blanket in the Cloud — or wherever else we’ve chosen to keep it hidden.

Of course, a lot of people won’t believe the plug got pulled — certainly not at a moment when they believe the Federal government is about to impose martial law in Texas — and so the reported suspension of surveillance will more likely reinforce their paranoia.

But for those who believe that a measure of freedom lost has been reclaimed — at least for now — how will that freedom be enjoyed?

That’s where I draw a blank.

I’ve seen the polls in which some people say that NSA surveillance has changed how they use email and made them inclined to censor themselves and yet I’ve always been baffled by these reactions.

Most NSA critics who have studied the issue are acutely aware that mass surveillance is virtually useless for gathering information about terrorism, so how exactly might it accumulate useful information about you or me?

From Sunday to Monday, we will cross over from a world in which we are watched but unseen, into a world in which we will remain unseen. If that seems like a profound transition, I’d say your fixation on personal freedom has become a distraction from much more serious issues that truly shape our world.

There are plenty of good reasons to be opposed to mass surveillance — including the principle that no democratic government should claim the right to spy on its own citizens. But we have less reason to be concerned about intrusions on our privacy than that over-funded intelligence agencies have exploited public fear and manipulated Congress in order to create programs of negligible value.

If mass surveillance is about to quietly die, maybe the lesson that can be drawn is that the threat it supposedly posed and the need it supposedly met, were both wildly overstated.

The NSA’s appetite to gather information has always exceeded its capacity to use it, but the same cannot be said for Google or Facebook. The NSA never was and never could become more than a flea on the back of a digital infrastructure that primarily serves Silicon Valley.

Most of the information that is being gathered about each and every one of us is not being swept up in secret but dished out freely down what we have come to regard as lifelines connecting us to the world.

Rather than being subject to unwanted surveillance, we are far more subject to networks of dependence which affect what we want, what we expect, and how we live.

Big Brother is less inclined to breath down our neck than hold our hand. And if the grip feels too tight it’s because we’re afraid of letting go.

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Reality checks in debate over surveillance laws

Charlie Savage reports: As the Senate moves closer to a Sunday night showdown over whether it will let Patriot Act surveillance powers expire on Monday, supporters and critics of how the government has used those authorities have been using increasingly alarming language.

But there is little evidence in the history of the expiring laws — including the one that the government uses to justify the once-secret National Security Agency program that vacuums up Americans’ phone records in bulk — to support the arguments that either side is making.

Republican senators who want to keep the program are warning that any lapse in “this critical tool would lead to attacks on the United States,” as Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, recently put it. Yet throughout the program’s existence, it has never thwarted a terrorist attack, studies and testimony show.

At the same time, proponents of ending the program say it poses risks to Americans’ private lives, by permitting the government to know who has been calling psychiatrists or political groups, for example. But despite the discovery of technical violations of the rules several years ago, no evidence has emerged that the program has been misused for political or personal gain. As a result, the privacy-minded critics have had to couch their warnings in hypothetical terms. [Continue reading…]

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Inside NSA, officials privately criticize ‘collect it all’ surveillance

Peter Maass writes: As members of Congress struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing.

“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”

The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.

The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats. The titles of the documents capture their overall message: “Data Is Not Intelligence,” “The Fallacies Behind the Scenes,” “Cognitive Overflow?” “Summit Fever” and “In Praise of Not Knowing.” Other titles include “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept” and “Overcome by Overload?” [Continue reading…]

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Jason Rezaian trial: Journalists cannot expect justice in Iran

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

In Iran’s capital Tehran, American journalist Jacob Rezaian is being tried for espionage behind closed doors by a revolutionary court. No-one except his court-appointed attorney was allowed beside him – his wife, who also faces trial for her reporting, and his mother were barred from attending.

Rezaian, an Iranian-American national, is the Washington Post’s correspondent in Tehran. Between his imprisonment in July 2014 and the initial trial hearing on Tuesday, he had been allowed only one brief meeting with his attorney. Only weeks before his court appearance, he still did not know the charges.

This story is not unique to Rezaian. It is also the story of Keyvan Samimi, who was recently released after six years behind bars. Or Ahmad Zeidabadi exiled to northern Iran as soon as his sentence ended on May 18. Or Hossein Ronaghi-Maleki, rearrested on February 28 despite poor health from his detention between December 2009 and October 2014. Or Marzieh Rasouli, accused of colluding with the BBC. Or Reyhaneh Tabatabaei, arrested after she expressed support on Facebook for a fellow journalist who had been given a long prison term.

Or scores of other Iranian journalists and bloggers who have been put away, in closed trials and without the semblance of due process, before and after the disputed 2009 presidential election and the mass protests that followed.

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ISIS alternates stick and carrot to control Palmyra

The New York Times reports: Hours after they swept into the Syrian city of Palmyra last week, Islamic State militants carried out scores of summary executions, leaving the bodies of victims — including dozens of government soldiers — in the streets.

Then, residents say, they set about acting like municipal functionaries. They fixed the power plant, turned on the water pumps, held meetings with local leaders, opened the city’s lone bakery and started distributing free bread. They planted their flag atop Palmyra’s storied ancient ruins, and did not immediately loot and destroy them, as they have done at other archaeological sites.

Next came dozens of Syrian government airstrikes, some killing civilians. That gave the Islamic State a political assist: Within days, some residents had redirected the immediate focus of their anger and fear from the militants on the ground to the warplanes overhead.

In Palmyra, the Islamic State group appears to be digging into power in a series of steps it has honed over two years of accumulating territory in Iraq and Syria.

But Palmyra presents a new twist: It is the first Syrian city the group has taken from the government, not from insurgents. In Raqqa, farther north, and in Iraq, the group has moved quickly and harshly against anyone perceived as a rival.

The Islamic State alternates between terrorizing residents and courting them. It takes over institutions. And it seeks to co-opt opposition to the government, painting itself as the champion of the people — or at least, the Sunnis — against oppressive central authorities. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s ISIS strategy: Something in preference to nothing

The Daily Beast reports: The self-proclaimed Islamic State has claimed a major provincial capital in Iraq and taken over another strategically key city in Syria. In response, the Obama administration plans to do — well, not much of anything new.

Four defense officials told The Daily Beast that there’s still strong resistance within the Obama administration to making any serious changes to the current strategy for fighting ISIS — despite mounting skepticism from some in the Pentagon about the current U.S. approach to the war.

Although the Obama administration’s public messaging is that it still wants to “degrade and ultimately defeat” ISIS, in reality, many in the Pentagon view the real objective as just running out the clock.

“I think this is driven by a sense that this not our fight and so we are just going to try to contain it and have influence where we can,” one official who works closely on the military strategy explained to The Daily Beast. “This is a long fight, and it will be up to the next administration to tackle.”

Rather than aiming for a decisive victory, the U.S. approach has devolved into simply maintaining a low boil in perpetuity.

They said they realize that the political strategy supersedes the military one; there is no public appetite for ground troops in Iraq; there is frustration about corruption within the Iraqi government; and there is a lack of a clear alternative approach.

“It’s a political response,” one official explained. “They are doing ‘something’ to inoculate themselves from substantial criticism.”

Some are more blunt, saying no one wants to invest too much time or resources in crafting an alternative. [Continue reading…]

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Khorasan: Syria’s mysterious ‘strangers with horses’

The Guardian reports: In Idlib province, they are known as “the strangers with the horses”. Among the senior ranks of Jabhat al-Nusra, they are referred to as “our friends”. In Europe and the US, the small band of jihadis is known by the contentious name “Khorasan” and blamed for hatching plots to attack the west.

All seem to agree on one thing: just what the highly secretive group is up to in northern Syria remains one of the civil war’s enduring mysteries. This week, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra claimed there was no such group as Khorasan and said he had been directed by al-Qaida’s central leadership to concentrate his group’s energies on Syria.

Abu Mohamed al-Jolani’s remarks, in an interview with al-Jazeera, were the first time that al-Nusra – a jihadi organisation with links to al-Qaida and a formidable player in the Syrian war – had addressed the issue of Khorasan, which the US accuses of collaborating with al-Nusra to target western interests outside of Syria.

The remarks were immediately rejected by western officials and residents of Idlib. Two senior Islamists with close links to al-Nusra have also outlined to the Guardian in recent weeks their understanding of Khorasan’s intent and its close ties to homegrown jihadi groups.

“Until recently they wanted nothing to do with the Syrian war,” said one ranking official. “They only wanted to use Syria as a stadium for whatever they were up to elsewhere.

“But that’s different now. In the attack on Idlib city they played a direct role. They co-ordinated most of the dangerous attacks. Without them, Idlib would not have fallen.”

The claim that Khorasan had played a direct role in helping jihadi and mainstream elements of the Syrian opposition seize a major city marks the first time that any official has been prepared to acknowledge working alongside the group. “They are a very big secret, you know,” the official said. “They work directly for [al-Qaida leader Ayman] al-Zawahiri.”

Until recently, all residents and jihadis interviewed by the Guardian had painted a picture of a remote and impenetrable outfit that kept entirely to itself and whose members regularly moved to avoid US air strikes. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen: Scores of civilians killed and injured by anti-aircraft fire and airstrikes on weapons depots

Amnesty International: Scores of casualties in Sana’a have been caused by anti-aircraft munitions shot by the Huthi armed group which detonated after landing in populated areas killing and maiming civilians, said Amnesty International.

During a week-long trip to the Yemeni capital, the organization spoke to medical staff at nine hospitals and residents who said that anti-aircraft weapons were the leading cause of casualties in the capital. Saudi Arabian-led coalition airstrikes against weapons depots in residential areas have triggered further explosions, also killing and injuring other civilians.

“Sana’a’s residents are caught in a deadly crossfire between the Saudi Arabian-led coalition airstrikes and anti-aircraft fire from the Huthi armed group. Both sides have failed to take the necessary precautions to protect civilian lives in violation of the laws of war. Instead they have carried out attacks that have had devastating consequences for the civilian population,” said Lama Fakih, Senior Crisis Advisor at Amnesty International.

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Can the Kurds stop Erdogan’s bid for total power?

Henri J. Barkey writes: The upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections may prove to be far more dramatic than any in Turkey’s recent past. No matter what the outcome, the country is likely to be heading into an unprecedented crisis.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has staked Turkey’s future constitutional order on the outcome of the vote. Erdogan, after 11 years as prime minister with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), has assumed the largely ceremonial position of president. While the president is supposed to be impartial, he has been campaigning ferociously in support of his old party because he wants it to win a comfortable majority in parliament — more than 330 seats in the 550-seat parliament, to be precise. Such an outcome will enable him to lay the groundwork for a new political system, which would shift power from the prime minister to a French-style executive president.

Erdogan is a towering figure of Turkish politics. He dominates his party, which in principle is being run by his handpicked prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. He has also succeeded in neutralizing the once dominant force of Turkish politics, the armed forces. He is used to getting what he wants, and brooks no opposition — just ask his erstwhile ally, the religious leader Fethullah Gülen, whose powerful network of schools, media outlets, and business associations in Turkey are being dismantled piece by piece after a falling out with Erdogan.

Polling results have varied quite a bit in this election. The AKP is averaging support in the low 40s, while the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is polling in the mid- to high 20s and the nativist Nationalist Action Party seems likely to receive roughly 13 percent of the vote. It is unlikely, but possible, that the AKP will win fewer than 276 seats, which would force the formation of a coalition government. AKP supporters appear worried and have put together a very aggressive campaign — using state resources for the task, and crowding out the other parties from the airwaves.

What stands in the way of Erdogan and his 330 seats in parliament is the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which represents a significant majority of Turkey’s Kurdish population. [Continue reading…]

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