Roy Gutman

Turkey’s powerful prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, launched parliamentary debate this week on a new law that would open formal negotiations with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party to end a 30-year armed rebellion.

With Iraq’s security forces having fled the country’s northern provinces and abandoned the region to extremists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Syrian rebel leaders are calling on the United States to “stand with us” in the fight against the terror group and provide the weapons needed to defeat them.

When Islamic extremists captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, on Tuesday, followed by Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, on Wednesday, the biggest surprise to residents was that the army and police abandoned their posts without a fight.

At Radio Respublika, the voice of the armed pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine’s biggest city, the staff consists of disk jockeys and technicians _ and a lone reporter, whose name is kept secret.

Russia’s withdrawal of troops from its border with Ukraine has eased fears in Ukraine and the West that President Vladimir Putin will launch a full-scale invasion.　

The Ukrainian army said Tuesday that it had evicted armed separatists from the international airport in Donetsk after a 24-hour gun battle, but the government in Kiev warned of a new threat as truckloads of armed Russian volunteers reportedly crossed the border.

It’s the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one in the international community has oversight or responsibility.

The Ukrainian military staged an airborne assault and air attacks against pro-Russian separatists who seized the biggest airport in eastern Ukraine early Monday. But hours of gun battles left the strategic facility in dispute, and the fighting spread to city of Donetsk.

In a major challenge to Ukraine’s newly elected president, armed separatists early Monday sent forces into the biggest airport in eastern Ukraine and are in a standoff with the Ukrainian army, an airport spokesman said.

Ukrainians on Sunday appeared to have chosen Petro Poroshenko, the billionaire “Chocolate King,” as their first president since a pro-European revolution ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Election workers in this city of a half million on Saturday night completed preparations for Sunday’s presidential election, uncertain whether voters will brave the threats of armed pro-Russian militants who have set up a base just blocks from the election commission’s offices..

As voters go to the polls Sunday to choose their first president after a street revolution ousted Viktor Yanukovych in February, Ukraine is on a knife’s edge. It is sure to grow closer to Europe, the aim of the uprising, but it also could come apart in a civil war that would invite a Russian intervention.

Tents have run out at newly built camps for Syrians fleeing the government’s assault on their towns and villages, and for Yassin Alway that means sleeping in the open.

A leading international human rights watchdog slammed Turkey on Friday for passing new laws that she said would further intimidate independent journalists in a country where freedom of expression is already severely limited and the news media have become “critically stifled.”

Every three months for the past three years, renowned journalists and best-selling authors have been trooping into a courtroom in Istanbul’s ultra-modern palace of justice, defendants in a trial that they view _ and regularly denounce _ as a mockery of law.