Tag: Terör

  • How the Turkish Government Cancels The Passports of Critics

    How the Turkish Government Cancels The Passports of Critics

    Huff POST da Turkiye vatandaslarinin Pasaportlarini iptal ediyormus bu isi de Polis Isthibarat ile MIT yapiyormus diye kocaman bir makale yazmislar…3-4 kisi ye de misal olark kotmuslar Turk gazetelerinde hicbir haber yok
    Umit Bayulken
    Aydoğan Vatandaş
    Aydoğan Vatandaş Journalist, writer and politic

    Imagine that you have enough money and a passport to travel abroad. You may be a businessman to follow your meetings or just a tourist hoping to practice new things during your trip in another country.

    If you are a Turkish citizen, you should think twice.

    It is not a secret that after Erdogan consolidated his power, Turkey has already turned into a dictatorship.

    The sources now reveal that Turkish Government has started another unlawful activity against his citizens. The Turkish Government cancels the passports of some journalists, businessmen and NGO representatives through some fabricated applications.

    The first step of this conspiracy engineered by the Turkish Government is to fabricate ‘a loss notice’ in a newspaper on behalf of the targeted individual. Once the loss notice appears in a paper, the Government cancels the passport. The people find out this illegal cancelation only when they are about to go abroad at the airport venue. The police seize their passports and don’t let them go out. But it may also happen when you are out of Turkey. Many people who are already out of Turkey face similar difficulties during the security check at the Customs. They are told that their passports are seen ‘lost’ in their system and advised to visit their Embassies or Consulates to solve the problem. However, when the people go to their Embassies, their passports are being seized without any explanation.

    Some aggrieved has already started legal term by means of their counselors. Those who face this conspiracy while they are abroad apply to Interpol and inform that their passports are not lost.

    According to the claims, hundreds of Turkish businessmen, journalists, teachers, and bureaucrats were recorded by a team established by Police Intelligence Department and the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Information about the names on the list prepared by these organizations are sent to the Passport Department. And the Passport units cancel the passports of the persons, whose names appear on the list.

    The illegal practice was revealed when S. A., a person involved in business in Ankara applied to Ankara Directorate of Security, in order to extend the validity of his passport. The businessman went to the Passport department last month. He stated that he wants to extend the validity of his visa, because he wants to go abroad. But the personnel at the passport department told him that his passport was cancelled through a ‘loss’ notice, and that he might find the detailed information at Police Passport Department. Thereupon the businessman went to the Passport Department’s campus in Ankara, he repeated again that he didn’t issue such any loss notice for his passport. The officials rejected to provide any detailed information.

    A teacher working abroad also faced a similar problem. The teacher who went to the airport to go back to the country he worked after his vacation in Turkey found out at that his passport was cancelled at the passage. Even though the teacher never issued such a loss notice for his passport, the justification was the same.

    The last aggrieved of the passport conspiracy was Mrs. Nevin İpek, the wife of Mr. Akın İpek, the President of Koza İpek Holding which was taken over by President Erdogan last year. İpek applied to Embassy of Turkey in London last week, to extend the validity of her passport. The Embassy officials seized İpek’s passport, stating that there is a ‘loss notice’ for her passport. İpek told them that she never issued any loss notice on a newspaper in or abroad. Yet, she could not persuade the Embassy officials.

    Mr. Nazif Apak, a columnist for Turkish Yeni Hayat Daily, who first drew attention on the passport conspiracy of the Turkish Government in his article titled ‘Who plays with the passport?’ on April 23, wrote that a businessman, whose family has done trade for three generations faced a similar incident, too. He wrote that, when the businessman reacted ‘How come! I came to your land with this passport and want to go to that country from here,’ then the officials said that his passport is seen ‘lost’ in their system. When the businessman carries the case to Interpol, the respond was this: ‘Unfortunately Turkey is forging on the documents and declares passports of many people lost,’ Apak wrote.

    Issuing a loss notice is under the authority of only the bearers of passports and ID cards. Even should a loss notice be issued, when the passport is found later, it is legally valid and the police officials are not appointed or authorized to follow the loss notices.

    As long as there exists no ban to travel abroad forwarded to a person by the Court, one may travel to anywhere. This is a universal right and under the protection of freedom of travel. The passports of persons may not become invalid due to loss notices, and detention of people from going abroad by such means is a Government fraud and only happens in a dictatorship.

    al analyst

     

  • More ISIS Atrocities Surface: 250 Women Executed for Refusing ‘Sexual Jihad’

    More ISIS Atrocities Surface: 250 Women Executed for Refusing ‘Sexual Jihad’

  • How Turkey Misreads the Kurds   ……….. NY times

    How Turkey Misreads the Kurds ……….. NY times

    FEB. 24, 2016

    Turkish policeman and protesters clash during a demonstration against government-imposed curfews. Credit Ilyas Akengin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    The Turkish government’s hostility toward the Kurds is drawing the country further into the Syrian war, complicating the battlefield and fanning new tensions between Ankara and the United States. The dispute with the Kurds also risks bringing Turkey into direct conflict with Russia, destabilizing the region even more.

    Turkey has long feared Kurdish aspirations for a separate state. The Kurds are an ethnic group of perhaps 35 million in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, where about 15 million live. Last fall, in a politically calculated move before an important election, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey resumed a war against the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in the southern part of his country. More recently, his forces began attacking Kurdish militants across the border in Syria.

    A big part of the problem is that Mr. Erdogan refuses to acknowledge important differences between the two Kurdish groups. The United States and Turkey both consider the P.K.K. a terrorist group; it has openly claimed responsibility for bombings and attacks that have shaken Turkey. By contrast, the United States sees the Syrian Kurds not as terrorists but as a highly effective adversary against the Islamic State whose focus is protecting Kurdish areas of Syria from the civil war. Washington provides the group with intelligence and other assistance.
    Photo

    Last week, Turkey added to the tensions by blaming the Syrian Kurds for a bombing in Ankara that killed 28 people. The Syrian Kurds denied responsibility; American officials say the culprit was likely a P.K.K. splinter group. Mr. Erdogan went so far as to demand that the Americans choose between him and the Syrian Kurds, which Washington refused to do.
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    The United States has urged Mr. Erdogan to halt his attacks on the Syrian Kurds, who now control most of the 565-mile boundary with Turkey and may soon seize the last section of territory that would give them a contiguous region. American officials say the Turks agreed to a pause in the fighting negotiated by the United States and Russia that takes effect Saturday.

    At the same time, Washington has asked the Syrian Kurds to resist taking advantage of the chaos of war to seize more land. An effort on their part to claim that final patch of territory along the border could provoke Mr. Erdogan to come down even harder with military force. One worry is that Russia, which is also courting Kurdish allegiance by providing air cover for their operations, would then retaliate against Turkey on behalf of the Kurds. President Vladimir Putin of Russia may indeed be looking for an excuse to pay Turkey back for shooting down a Russian jet that strayed into Turkish airspace in November, but Mr. Erdogan should resist giving him an excuse to do so.

    Mr. Erdogan’s problems with the Kurds are largely of his own making. He had in fact made some headway in peace talks with Kurdish leaders in Turkey before resuming hostilities last year. He should seek ways to revive that process. As for the Kurds in Syria, he should stop shelling them and instead work with the United States to find a way to accommodate what could eventually become an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria. Mr. Erdogan has found a way to work with the Kurds in Iraq. Fighting Syrian Kurds and inflaming tensions with America makes no sense.

     

  • Should the United States Ban the Islamic State From Facebook?

    Should the United States Ban the Islamic State From Facebook?

    The fine line between free speech and incitement to terrorism has never been so contested.

    If the great fear after 9/11 was terrorism arriving on American shores via airplanes, the great fear after Paris and San Bernardino is that it will come via the Internet. From the U.N. Security Council to Congress to the campaign trail, the last few weeks have seen calls to crack down on incitement to terrorism online: to erase the screeds of al Qaeda propagandists, expunge Islamic State sympathizers from Twitter, and pair federal law enforcement officials and Silicon Valley executives in a quest to extirpate violent radicalism from Twitter and YouTube.

    Yet for all of their compelling logic, some calls to digitally disarm extremists run counter to a core precept of the unique American approach to safeguarding freedom of expression and countering pernicious ideas.

    Yet for all of their compelling logic, some calls to digitally disarm extremists run counter to a core precept of the unique American approach to safeguarding freedom of expression and countering pernicious ideas. In the United States, willingness to protect even dangerous speech dates back to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, “We have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left free to demonstrate their errors and especially when the law stands ready to punish the first criminal act produced by the false reasoning.” An early broad ban on incitement, the 1798 Sedition Act, criminalized publishing “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government with the intent to “excite against [Congress and the president] … the hatred” of the people. The act was used brazenly by the ruling Federalists as a political tool to suppress the Democratic-Republican opposition. It was quickly discredited and allowed to expire. After his election, Jefferson pardoned those convicted under its terms.

    In modern times, the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenberg v. Ohio held that the Constitution permits banning incitement to violence only when it is intentional and when the action it exhorts is both imminent and illegal. Since then, absent any of the three elements — intention, imminence, or lawlessness — the speech in question cannot be constitutionally forbidden. The imminence requirement — embodied in the mythic shouting of fire in a crowded theater — has been interpreted to mean that the directive must be targeted, with a likelihood that the admonition to lawlessness will actually be heeded. Under Brandenberg, broad categories of noxious speech — sloganeering at a Ku Klux Klan rally, holocaust denial, or Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois — are constitutionally protected. This status contrasts sharply with much of the rest of the world, where such speech is subject to government prohibitions.

    The United States has been steadfast in refusing to subordinate its broad free speech protections to international norms. In 1992, when the Senate ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the world’s premier human rights treaty, it spelled out areas where the international protocol would be overridden by the U.S. Constitution. Among the most prominent pertained to Article 20 of the covenant which bans “national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” Believing that this provision violates the First Amendment, the Senate adopted a reservation stating that “Article 20 does not … restrict the right of free speech and association protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” In short, while most nations — including such liberal societies as Canada, France, and Germany — accept the Article 20 injunction on incitement to “discrimination, hostility or violence,” the United States has judged it unconstitutional.

    In recent years, Washington has vociferously defended this standard, rejecting efforts at the United Nations to invoke Article 20 as grounds for broad proscriptions of what some consider contemporary forms of incitement. The Obama administration has argued that, while they may be in poor taste, efforts to ban depictions of the Prophet Mohammed and other offenses to religious sensibilities violate basic precepts of free expression. In time-honored American fashion, free speech advocates ranging from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty to progressive groups including Human Rights First have urged the United States to stick to a firm line against global bans on hate speech, arguing that the answer to inflammatory speech is not suppression, but more speech.

    But now the long-standing U.S. refusal to support broad bans on incitement is under pressure. Families of terrorism victims, political candidates, and the White House are all calling for Silicon Valley to join with the government in silencing digital purveyors of terrorism. The rationale is clear: depriving terrorist conspirators of the tools to proselytize, prey on the impressionable, and plan dastardly acts. Amid the sprawling subcultures of social media, the task of rebutting dangerous speech with more inspiring ideologies, anti-Islamic State Twitter accounts, and better viral videos — the “meet pernicious speech with more speech” approach — however laudable and necessary, seems impossible. Lawmakers are now clamoring for a more aggressive approach. In mid-December, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill entitled “Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act of 2015,” calling for a comprehensive strategy to curb terrorist messaging online. Earlier last year, the bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), and other lawmakers wrote to the then-CEO of Twitter expressing concern that terrorists “actively use Twitter to disseminate propaganda, drive fundraising, and recruit new members — even posting graphic content depicting the murder of individuals they have captured.”

    If online companies block this speech voluntarily under their own private content restrictions — rather than submitting to official dictates of censorship — the long-held American distaste for broad government bans on incitement will technically stand intact. Right now, online platforms are rushing to introduce tightened rules on content, undoubtedly hoping to preempt having such rules imposed on them by the government or the courts. Facebook is now being sued by more than 20,000 Israelis who seek no damages, but rather an injunction requiring the service to excise incitement and terrorism recruitment. Last week, Twitter adopted a stiffer definition of prohibited speech, declaring: “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.” A census by the Brookings Institution calculated that Twitter was home to at least 46,000 accounts maintained by the Islamic State, many of which will be shut off if the new standard is enforced.

    Tech moguls and speech-control advocates must proceed with caution.

    Tech moguls and speech-control advocates must proceed with caution. While social media companies are indeed private actors, some of the most powerful platforms they control are the modern equivalent of a public square. Ideas and voices that are barred from these arenas will face high hurdles to be heard. While that’s good news when it comes to violent masterminds, it also means that in the rush to expunge terrorism, legitimate voices, ideas, and perspectives could also be suppressed, potentially on suspect grounds relating to religion or national origin. Borderline questions will inevitably arise with respect to speech that has historically been protected, but has now taken on a new, more ominous quality: speech that celebrates or praises violent acts already committed; speech by a known terrorist sympathizer that is innocent on its face but could have a hidden meaning to followers; a quotation from scripture that could have violent implications if applied literally. The questions of judgment are potentially endless, and it isn’t clear who will answer them — intelligence analysts, judges, or junior staff snacking on free food in a Menlo Park conference room. Moreover, pervasive calls from lawmakers and even the White House for collaboration between Washington and Silicon Valley raise even thornier questions about who will really decide what speech is off-limits and whether and how they can be held accountable.

    When it comes to content itself, Brandenburg is relevant. Ideological entreaties, glorifications of martyrs, and celebrations of terrorist acts — however repugnant — are not themselves incitement to violence. They can be monitored, flagged, and even taken down by private parties but not censored under U.S. law. This is to the good, because their criminalization would lead us down a slippery slope. In late 2014, Islamic leaders in Australia argued that the definition of incitement under that country’s law could criminalize preaching from the Quran, supporting resistance movements in the West Bank, or backing factions opposed to the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic Council of Victoria argued that a proposed counterterrorism measure “could see to it that there are no voices of disagreement or debate on the subject [of what constitutes terror] for fear of prosecution.”

    Unavoidably, messages of resistance that are sinister when posted in the name of the Islamic State may read far more benignly when posted by, for example, radical climate change activists or protesters against Russia President Vladimir Putin. Social media purposefully divorces content from context, forcing readers to discern meaning and intent by drawing on knowledge and understanding that they must aggregate on their own. While a court may be able to weigh considerations of context carefully and objectively, a young analyst assessing thousands of posts a day and hoping to help stave off further government intrusion into the prerogatives of Silicon Valley seems bound to rely on shorthand involving preconceptions and probably also prejudices. One easy out, expanding prohibitions wholesale to encompass debatable forms of religious or political content, would render whole categories of legitimate speech off-limits to Tweeters and Facebookers. The United States should not go there.

    A further layer of complexity is added when one considers non-public forms of messaging and incitement — such as San Bernardino assassin Tashfeen Malik’s private messages on Facebook or posts on services like WhatsApp. While most digital platforms rely on voluntary reporting of suspect content as a trigger to take down material that violates community standards and the law, or both, that is less likely to happen regarding private messages that only one person sees. Trying to police these messages — whether the surveillance is undertaken by the online services themselves, the government, or some combination thereof — walks right into a host of legal issues that make the challenges to the PRISM program revealed by Edward Snowden look simple.

    Surveilling so-called “metadata” — participants, time, and duration of communications, but not their content — would be of limited use in tracking terrorist efforts to recruit and inspire those with no prior history of extremist activity. Without looking at the words used, the ideas conveyed, and the responses elicited, it is hard to imagine how anyone could usefully discern whether an online communication could be dangerous. Potential terrorists use messaging platforms the way we all use the phone or email: for private, voluntary, and mutual communications with others. Absent rigorous judicial enforcement and search warrants based on individualized suspicion, steps to ferret out dangerous content on private platforms would reshape the very nature of these modes of communication and risk destroying the privacy associated with them.

    Some have pointed to evidence suggesting that hate speech, by fanning discrimination and dehumanization, can lower the barriers to the actual commission of hate crimes. Since hate crimes are illegal, the thinking goes, hate speech can be targeted as a predicate to a crime. Yet there is no evidence that banning hate speech will actually break the causal chain that links hateful ideologies to hateful acts. Fourteen European countries have legally prohibited Holocaust denial (bans that would be unconstitutional in the United States), and yet anti-Semitism is nonetheless on the rise throughout most of Europe, according to the United Nations. While there is plenty of room to argue about cause and effect, there is no proof that prohibiting hate speech prevents hate crimes. It is plausible that bad speech may encourage bad acts but also that banning such speech may only strengthen the speaker’s determination to get the message out, in deeds if not words.

    Some commentators argue that in an age of instant transmission it is no longer possible to draw a line between hate speech and hate crimes; that the window for law enforcement to intercede between the two has become impossibly narrow. But the real difference in the digital era may be less in the relationship between speech and crimes than in the digital trail that — after the fact — suggests that had we only surveilled, sifted, and spied more intently and intrusively the violence could have been prevented. Missing from that picture are the tens of thousands of hateful and suspicious missives exchanged every day that never culminate in crimes. Unless we are sure we can distinguish the merely disturbing from the truly dangerous, the task of sorting — much less censoring — this vast international ocean of communication risks becoming a deadly distraction.

    Moreover, the standards set in the United States will influence the approaches of governments around the world, establishing precedents their citizens will be forced to live with. Whether it’s China’s Tibetans, Turkey’s PKK, or Morocco’s Polisario, since 9/11 many governments have found it useful to brand their domestic antagonists “terrorists” in order to legitimize repressive tactics. If the United States were to erase the online traces of the Islamic State, other governments will surely do the same to those they consider threats: ethnic minorities, alleged separatists, and political opponents. Wasting no time, in late December, China passed a harsh new counterterrorism law, invoking global fears of online recruitment and incitement as justification for a measure that provides for broad powers of surveillance and censorship.

    Some governments, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, have also conflated incitement with provocation. Between 1999 and 2010, the Organization of the Islamic Conference introduced annual U.N. resolutions calling for prohibitions on insults to religion on grounds not that they encouraged violence but rather that they could trigger violent reprisals from those who felt offended by them. (The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals subscribed to a similar argument in relation to the Innocence of Muslims short film that became a violent flashpoint in 2012. In this excerpt from his dissent, Judge Stephen Reinhardt explains where the court went wrong.) If the United States backs away from its narrow definition of incitement as applying only to intentional encouragement of imminent lawless violence, it could open the door to arguments that Washington has long derided as inimical to free speech.

    As officials and social media executives decide how to respond to calls to cut off incitement online, they should begin on the firmest legal ground, by targeting incitement to imminent violence — direct and specific calls to commit murder and acts of terrorism. If there are categories of speech that do not qualify as incitement — such as terrorist recruitment activity — legislators and judges need to consider other ways to target and prohibit them. Inevitably, some commentators will claim that that new laws and judicial decisions settling these matters will take too long. There will be those who argue that whatever is done to curb online incitement does not go far enough, that the risk to national security is too great. America’s high standard for the protection of free speech has been a point of pride for more than 200 years. It should not be willingly surrendered.

    Photo credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

  • Saudi Arabia Is the George W. Bush of the Middle East

    Saudi Arabia Is the George W. Bush of the Middle East

    Riyadh has a clear strategy – just not one that Washington should endorse.

     

    Even for the Middle East, the last few days qualify as a rough patch. Let’s recap: The Saudi government executed a prominent political dissident and religious minority, despite knowing in advance that it would spark domestic and international backlash. In doing so, it made a growing sectarian problem in the region even worse; goaded Iranian hard-liners into storming the Saudi Embassy in Tehran; and severed diplomatic ties with Iran — all while refusing for the past two-and-a-half years to meet directly with Iran to de-escalate tensions. Now decision-makers in Riyadh are claiming to be the victim.

    This raises the question: What the hell is Saudi Arabia doing? Unfortunately, the most plausible answers aren’t very reassuring.

    Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saudi Arabia’s top geopolitical goal has been to maximize its power at Iran’s expense. The nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran has kicked Saudi Arabia’s fear of Iran’s geopolitical rise into overdrive. Riyadh sees Tehran’s reintegration into global political and economic structures as a threat to its own regional power.

    But Saudi Arabia’s paranoia is not solely reserved for Washington’s Iran policy. The Saudi government has viewed most U.S. regional preferences since 2003 as threats to Saudi power, including but not limited to: support for the post-Saddam Hussein government in Iraq; Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow in Egypt (and support for the Arab Spring in general); ending Riyadh’s disastrous military adventure in Yemen; and preferring a political solution over Saddam-style regime change in Syria. American and Saudi interests are diverging on multiple fronts. Riyadh’s latest escalation will exacerbate tensions with Iran in ways that make U.S. diplomatic objectives for Syria and Yemen difficult, if not impossible.

    What’s worse is that Saudi Arabia chooses to address its geopolitical fears by promoting anti-Shiite and anti-Iran sectarianism. The Saudi government’s analyses of the situations in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen have been identical and disturbingly unsophisticated: Shiite Muslims are the bad guys, and Shiite Iran is interfering in Sunni Arab affairs. This message empowers the Middle East’s worst ideologues — the kind who think the Islamic State is admirable and the 9/11 attacks might not have been such a bad thing.

    While this may help temporarily deflect domestic Saudi attention from a growing number of self-inflicted wounds — domestic austerity measures, and the wars in Syria and Yemen, to name a few — it also increases the likelihood that a generation of Saudi citizens will come of age identifying with an entitled, militarized, anti-Shiite, anti-Iran view of the region. The possibility of Saudi nationalism resembling a combination of Donald Trump and Osama bin Laden is a terrifying prospect — and not just for Iran.

    Yet Saudi Arabia says it doesn’t want to destroy its alliance with the United States, and it doesn’t want war with Iran. So why is it destabilizing the region in ways that make both outcomes more likely?

    Simply put, they do it because they know they can get away with it. Saudi leaders, by promoting their extremist Sunni ideology, have already helped produce some of the worst anti-American terrorists with no cost to their alliance with the West. Rather than seek peaceful solutions to the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, Riyadh has thus far refused to settle for anything less than overthrowing Assad and eliminating the Houthis. As it tries to achieve outright victory, Saudi Arabia allies with or turns a blind eye to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, thereby further destabilizing the region — and Washington does nothing to hold its ally accountable.

    Let’s be honest: Unless short-term stability is your only concern, the Saudis have rarely been a force for good in the Middle East. Their regional policies of 2016 are simply more violent versions of policies they’ve pursued for decades. Current and former U.S. officials who have seen the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 report on Saudi government links to the hijackers seem to agree.

    The spin machine that Saudi Arabia is buying in Washington cannot distort the truth: It murdered a political dissident, poured gasoline on fiery sectarianism, incited a diplomatic crisis, and now claims to be the victim. Saudi Arabia has cut its ties to Iran while plunging neck deep into two reckless wars of choice. You could say that Saudi Arabia has become the George W. Bush of the Middle East.

    FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images

  • US withdrawing 12 warplanes from Turkish air base … Incirlik

    US withdrawing 12 warplanes from Turkish air base … Incirlik

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is withdrawing a dozen warplanes from a Turkish air base, barely a month after they arrived to help Turkey protect its air space and to conduct strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq, officials said Wednesday.

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    The decision was announced by U.S. European Command in Germany one day after Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Incirlik Air Base, where the six F-15 Eagles and six F-15 Strike Eagles arrived last month from their home base in Britain. A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, told reporters that the timing was a coincidence.

    During his visit Carter made no mention of the plan to withdraw the F-15s. He said the U.S. is looking for ways to do more to hasten the defeat of the Islamic State group, including by urging coalition partners to play a greater role.

    European Command’s announcement said the F-15s were returning to Britain on Wednesday.

    Davis said the withdrawal should not be seen as a change in the U.S. commitment to Turkey or to the counter-IS campaign.

    “I wouldn’t read anything into us moving these out of there as any sort of less combat capability … to be able to strike in Syria,” Davis said.

    The U.S. still has 12 A-10 close-air support aircraft based at Incirlik, as well as drone aircraft and refueling planes. The U.S. intends to replace six of the departing F-15s with a like number of additional A-10s, according to a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deployment has not been announced.

    Some coalition partners have expressed a willingness to send more planes to Incirlik before the end of January, the senior U.S. defense official said. That would push the total number of coalition warplanes at Incirlik back to, and possibly above, the total of 59 that were based there before the F-15s began leaving Wednesday, the official said.

    When Turkey agreed earlier this year to permit the U.S. to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State with planes based at Incirlik, the Pentagon touted the decision as an important milestone. It shortened the time and distance required to conduct airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, compared with strikes flown from bases in the Persian Gulf area.

    At the beginning of September there were 15 coalition aircraft based at Incirlik as part of the counter-IS coalition.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed from Baghdad.