ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

In the evening of February 15, 2011, the Libyan Revolution began with the first protests in Al-Beida, a city in the eastern region of Libya, the Cyrenaica. The situation escalated very quickly. Gaddafi’s security forces used deadly force against the initially peaceful demonstrators. Nevertheless, the revolution spread within a few days almost all over the country. Al-Beida, Derna, Tobruk, and Benghazi, the capital of the East quickly fell under control of the “thuwar”, the revolutionaries. In Tripolitania, the western part of Libya, cities like Misrata, Zawia, and Zintan freed themselves from the oppression of Gaddafi… The Revolution and its aftermath But within days the pendulum swung back. In a ghostly speech on the capital’s Green Square during the night of February 22, 2011, Gaddafi promised to “cleanse Libya house-by-house” and to “kill all the rats”. He did his very best to fulfill the promise. Security forces dispersed demonstrators in Tripoli with machine guns, fired with tanks...

There is a caricature that goes as follows: A man wakes up in a place that obviously looks like hell and says: “This is a very nice place – did I die and come to heaven?” The man behind him, half confused answers to that: “What have you been through in Turkey?” “Exaggeration” is already in the definition of the caricature and when compared with the things happening in Syria, Turkey surely is not a place that can be defined as “hell” (yet). However, this caricature reflects the feelings of millions of people in Turkey right now. Especially, the feelings of millions of people, who are educated, wise, secular, non-sectarian, anti-nationalists and pacifist… About a year and a half year ago, there was the feeling of living in a society proceeding to be more democratic, peaceful and the rules of law were still valid. However, today, we are living in an environment that one man is actually doing whatever he wants and there is no legal structure that can control him. Recent years, inside and...

The map shows the Kudish insurgency in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq in November-December, 2016 The insurgency of the Kurdish PKK and its armed wing HPG (Hêzên Parastina Gel, People’s Defence Force, in Turkey) has intensified throughout 2016 in southeastern Turkey, causing a tightening of the Turkish government’s military and administrative repression. They regained control of cities like Cizre, Nusaybin, Sirnak or Diyarbakir at the price of major destruction. Many mountainous and rural areas, however, are under de facto control of the insurgency. Another Kurdish separatist group, the TAK (Kurdistan Freedom Falcons), with unconventional methods of action (suicide attacks, car bombs), intensified their actions and committed several attacks against the Turkish security forces, including December 10 bombing in Istanbul, which left 45 dead (it is worth noting that neither the PKK, nor the TAK target civilians). In Iraq, Turkey has good relations with the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government ...