Russian Plane ‘Flew in International Airspace Parallel to Turkey’s Shores’
By JOE PARKINSON CONNECT
ISTANBUL—Turkey’s military said Tuesday that it had on Monday scrambled eight F16 jets along its Black Sea coast after detecting a Russian spy plane flying parallel to Turkish airspace.
According to a statement on the website of Turkey’s General Staff, which presides over the country’s armed forces, the jets were scrambled on Monday after a Russian IL-20 spy plane was spotted in international waters close to Turkish territory. “Eight F16 jets have been scrambled for control and prevention as an IL-20 spy plane belonging to the Russian Federation has flown in international airspace parallel to our shores,” the statement said.
Reports of the move come amid heightened tension in the Black Sea region after Russian troops entered the restive Ukrainian region of Crimea. The statement was published shortly after President Vladimir Putin said Moscow reserves the right to use force in Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking minorities in the country.
Defense analysts have been watching for additional military buildup in the Black Sea area, which is bordered by six countries including Turkey, Ukraine and Russia. Turkey regularly scrambles jets along its borders and in October alone did so three times after detecting Russian planes in Turkish airspace, according to Fazil Esad Altay, an analyst at the 21st Century Turkey Institute, an Ankara-based think tank.
Two Russian landing ships crossed into the Black Sea through Istanbul’s Bosporus Strait at 0530 GMT on Tuesday morning, returning from duty in the Mediterranean where they had been posted due to Syria’s civil war, Turkey’s state news agency said.
via Turkey Scrambles Jets After Detecting Russian Spy Plane – WSJ.com.
The detention of 25 Turkish students who visited Iran on suspicion they had been used for spying and propaganda activities reveals how tense Iran-Turkey relations actually have become. (photo by naturalgasasia.com)
By: Tulin Daloglu for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse Posted on October 4.
Since the Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in November 2002, there has been much debate about Turkey’s deepening identity crisis. Domestically, people are increasingly divided about the role of religion in political and civil life. Internationally, there have been allegations about Turkey’s tendencies toward moving away from its traditional Western alliance. While there is nothing surprising in all of this, since secularism has been one of the most contested components in this country’s political life since its establishment in 1923, what is intriguing is that the lack of debate about the strength of the people’s loyalty to Sunni traditions.
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
Summary :
The detention of 25 Turkish students who visited Iran on suspicion they had been used for spying and propaganda activities reveals how tense Iran-Turkey relations actually have become.
Author: Tulin Daloglu
Posted on: October 4 2013
Categories : Originals Turkey Iran Security
Despite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan government’s opening to Iran within the framework of its “zero problems with neighbors” policy, Turkey reminds us often that these two countries have never fought a war since the 1514 Battle of Chaldoran, where the Ottomans defeated the Safavid Empire. Although there may be a different reading of this historical record, too, one thing is clear: Since that battle, the Ottomans and the Persians have been divided as being the representatives of the Sunni and Shiite worlds, and they chose to keep their relationship at a controlled distance. That distance did not change after the foundation of the Turkish Republic from the ashes of a defeated Ottoman Empire.
So when Turkish authorities on Sept. 12 detained 25 Turkish students, ages 13-19, returning at the Gurbulak border gate from their 20-day study trip in Iran on the suspicion that they had been used for spying and propaganda activities, one needed to recall the long, historic perspective. Despite all the talks of brotherly bonding, there always has been a different underlying current between Ankara and Tehran. Although those students were quickly released after some questioning, pending further investigation, the leader of the group — identified only by the initials K.A. — was arrested. He said the Istanbul branch of Iran’s Camia-tul Mustafa University organized the study-course tour. Hurriyet Daily News reported that the university denies any involvement in this trip.
The students visited various universities, including sacred Shiite venues, over the 20-day course in Iran. They were introduced to the country’s leading religious scholars, and held conversations with them. They also studied political and religious courses. That is to say, from the Iranian perspective, they were shown utmost hospitality and taken good care of. From the perspective of Iran’s ambassador in Ankara, Alireza Bikdeli, these students are nothing but a bridge helping to strengthen the ties between the two countries.
“We have more than 3,000 Iranian students registered at our embassy starting their school year at the universities here,” Bikdeli told Al-Monitor. “Unfortunately though, there are only a few Turkish students in Iranian universities. And the latest news reports about the 25 students who visited Iran and were detained at the border gate were quite saddening.” The ambassador added: “If we also take the same path, and decide to interrogate our Iranian students about their stay here, we may end up bringing all our interrogation officers to the border with Turkey.”
So, why Iran does not take the same attitude and consider those Iranian students studying in Turkey as potential spies for the Ankara government? Or, why do the Turkish authorities worry about Turkish students visiting Iran, as if they can betray their country and faith as Sunni Muslims in a matter of 20 days, and move closer to the Iranian regime? Could there be a problem in Turkey regarding its loyalty to secularism and the Sunni faith?
This issue of arresting those 25 students actually begs answers to questions like the above, and none are easy to answer in some ways. But the truth could be quite simple and unpleasant to admit.
Tulin Daloglu is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse. She has also written extensively for various Turkish and American publications, including The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Middle East Times, Foreign Policy, The Daily Star (Lebanon) and the SAIS Turkey Analyst Report. On Twitter: @TurkeyPulse
via Turkey Suspects Turkish Students Who Visited Iran of Espionage – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.
(Reuters) – A Syrian man was jailed for 12 and a half years in Turkey on Wednesday for espionage, in what media reports said was a plot to abduct former Syrian military officers who had defected and were sheltering in refugee camps.
Sbahi Hamdo, described as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in the war-ravaged city of Aleppo, was accused of taking photographs of refugee camps and military facilities in the southern Turkish province of Hatay, the state-run Anatolian news agency reported.
He was arrested in October with a Turkish man, identified only as Mursel A, the news agency said.
A court convicted both men of “obtaining secret state information with the aim of political and military espionage.” The Turkish man was sentenced to six years and three months in jail, Anatolian said.
Officials at the court and Hatay’s governor’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.
Describing Hamdo as a Syrian intelligence operative nicknamed “Doctor”, the Today’s Zaman newspaper said he was involved in a plot to abduct senior Syrian military officers holed up in a refugee camp in Hatay after defecting from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
Both men denied the charges. Hamdo said he had been trying to track down a relative, Anatolian reported.
Dozens of Syrian military officers have defected to Turkey during the 20-month civil war, some of them joining the opposition push to oust Assad.
Around 120,000 civilians are also sheltering in refugee camps in Hatay and other provinces of southern Turkey bordering Syria.
(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Robin Pomeroy)
via Syrian jailed in Turkey for spying on refugee camps | Reuters.
Though not the capital, Istanbul is the cultural, economic and financial heart of Turkey. Situated on the Bosporus strait, this metropolis spans Europe and Asia — and has a storied history as a gathering place for spies.
Headlines today in Turkey feature stories of alleged Iranian spies, gathering information about Kurdish militants who are responsible for many deaths in Turkey this summer.
But these tales of deception and intrigue pale in comparison with the city’s storied past as a mecca for spies. Turkey’s golden age of espionage was World War II, a period that continues to serves as a muse for writers of historical thrillers.
A favorite setting for spy scenes is the bar at the Park Hotel, which stood next to the German Consulate. Had you poked your head in during the mid- to late- 1940s, you might have spied Elyeza Basna, the Albanian from Kosovo who became a legendary World War II Nazi spy known as “Cicero.”
You might also have bumped into Kim Philby, said to be one of the most successful traitors in British history. As it happens, one of the British agents exposed by Philby to his Soviet masters was David Cornwell, better known as John le Carre, who dramatized the hunt for Philby in the classic thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
The story was re-filmed last year, with Gary Oldman starring as head mole hunter George Smiley.
A recent addition to the thriller genre is Joseph Kanon’s Istanbul Passage. In a promotional video posted on his website, Kanon makes clear that this exotic and much fought-over city is a major character in the book.
“Istanbul was a city of Greeks and Armenians and Sephardic Jews and Circassian slave girls — all the peoples of a vast empire,” Kanon says. “It was also a city of spies.”
Kanon is following in some well-known footsteps. Ian Fleming had 007 drop in, and a modern master of the World War II spy thriller, Alan Furst, mentions Turkey and the Black Sea as well.
But aficionados of the genre tend to look back to the man who influenced le Carre and Graham Greene before him: Eric Ambler.
Ambler’s Journey Into Fear, adapted for the screen in 1942 by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, opens with a camera zooming in on a dingy Istanbul apartment, where a repulsive-looking assassin is combing his hair while ignoring the skips in his favorite phonograph record.
When an unknown assailant shoots Ambler’s protagonist, a stolid but innocent engineer named Howard Graham (Cotten), he doesn’t know what to make of the warning offered by Turkish police Col. Haki, played by Welles.
“You are a military objective,” Haki tells Graham, who expresses confusion over what Haki means.
“Mr. Graham, has your excellent brain grasped what I am trying to tell you? Someone is trying to kill you,” Haki responds.
After the war, as they say, things just weren’t the same. In 1966, a bevy of naval attaches from Russia, France, Britain, the U.S. and possibly other countries lost their jobs tracking ships on the Bosporus when the government threatened to yank their diplomatic immunity if they didn’t repair to the landlocked capital city of Ankara.
Spies may still be in Turkey, but the stories don’t seem nearly as inspiring — unless you count the discovery by residents of one southeastern village this year. They spied a dead bird – a common European bee-eater – wearing a tiny metal band around one leg. It was stamped “Israel.”
The police had a hard time convincing the villagers that there probably wasn’t a microchip in the bird’s nostrils, so they took the corpse away for examination — and declared it was not a threat to national security.
via Istanbul, a city of spies in fact and fiction | 89.3 KPCC.
ELKINS PARK, Pennsylvania — For the 26 months that Josh Fattal was held captive in Iran, his mother and brother were ever-present voices calling for his release. But his father, Jacob Fattal, never said a word.
It’s now clear why: The family feared that their Jewish faith — and Jacob Fattal’s ties to Israel — could make Josh’s unbearable situation worse because of Iran’s hard line against Israel.
Jacob Fattal is an Iraqi-born Jew who lived in Israel before moving to the United States and raising a family, according to reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Philadelphia-based Jewish Exponent.
In 2009, his son Josh Fattal was hiking with friends Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd in Iraq’s relatively peaceful Kurdish region when they were detained by Iranian authorities. The trio says they got lost and accidentally crossed into Iran, but authorities in Tehran charged them with spying.
Shourd was released about a year later. Fattal and Bauer, both 29, spent more than two years in Evin prison before being freed last week under a $1 million bail deal.
“We’re very happy; it’s the greatest gift we could have dreamed of receiving for Rosh Hashanah,” Jacob Fattal told Haaretz on Monday, a few days ahead of the Jewish New Year. “The problem was their being American, not Jewish. The Iranians used them as a political weapon for two years.”
No one answered the door Tuesday at the Fattals’ home in Elkins Park, a heavily Jewish suburb of Philadelphia where Josh and his brother Alex grew up. A message left for Jacob Fattal at his office was not immediately returned.
Aviva Daniel and Yael Nis, Josh Fattal’s aunts in Israel, told Israel’s Channel 2 on Tuesday that they only told a few people in Israel about Fattal’s Israeli connection — and swore them to secrecy.
“I believe the (Israeli) media knew, and cooperated, and kept it a secret,” said Nis. “We are really thankful for that.”
Nis asked various synagogues in Israel to include Fattal’s name in their regular prayers on behalf of people needing health and safety — without saying why.
“We prayed and our prayers were answered,” said Nis. “It is a miracle from God.”
Daniel said Fattal had visited Israel “a few times” over the past few years for family occasions. He speaks only a few words of Hebrew, Daniel added.
Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in Middle East politics, said it’s likely that both the Fattal family and the Iranians downplayed Fattal’s faith throughout the detention in order to leave the door open for a possible resolution.
While the family clearly made attempts to keep his faith out of the public eye, Lustick said, the Iranians probably knew that at least one of the detained hikers was Jewish but kept it quiet. If the family had trumpeted the fact that Fattal was Jewish, he said, it would been much more difficult to resolve the standoff.
“There was a kind of objective alliance between people in this country who didn’t talk about it publicly … and the Iranians also downplayed it,” Lustick said. “Really what happened was there was a general desire to find a way out.”
He added, “If you didn’t have officials in Iran who had always been keeping that information out of the news, then pretending to keep the secret in the United States wouldn’t have worked.”
Elliot Holin, rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami around the corner from the Fattals’ home, said Tuesday that the extended Jewish community in the Philadelphia area was aware of the delicate faith issue.
Though the Fattals belonged to another synagogue, Holin said, the hikers’ names were mentioned each week in Kol Ami’s Sabbath prayers for the past two years. When news of their release came, a member of the synagogue blew the horn known as the shofar during last Friday’s services.
Worshippers clearly felt an “incredible sense of relief and gratitude,” said Holin.
“You could see tears in people’s eyes,” he said.
Shourd has been living in Oakland, California, since her release. Bauer, who grew up in Onamia, Minnesota, proposed marriage to her while they were in prison.
___
Associated Press writers Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem and Patrick Walters in Philadelphia contributed to this story.
