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Turkish academics probed for criticizing military operations

It said two police relatives were killed in the vehicle bomb attack on the building, along with three people whose bodies were pulled from the wreckage.

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On Tuesday (Wednesday NZT), 10 German tourists were killed in Istanbul in a suicide attack by a suspected Islamic State militant. While we may not agree with the opinions expressed, we are nevertheless concerned about this pressure having a chilling effect on legitimate political discourse across Turkish society regarding the sources of and sollutions to the ongoing violence.”.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have vowed to fight both PKK and Islamic State.

Russian news agencies said he was suspected of helping send new recruits from Russia to the militant group. These are people in the dark.

Turkey’s president said Thursday that military operations would intensify against PKK Kurdish rebels after the group was blamed for a vehicle bombing of a police headquarters, and he promised there would no end to the military operations until the group was eradicated. Police also searched the homes of three academics in northwestern Bolu province, Dogan said.

Todays Zaman reported that Kocaeli University announced on Friday that it had launched an investigation into the detained academics.

The petition – which was highly critical of Turkey’s government and security forces, charging that they were carrying out a “massacre” – was launched this week as the country saw fighting between the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the state intensify.

The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey said recently that as many as 162 civilians have been killed in the restive regions placed under a government-imposed curfew since August 2015. Several other universities instigated probes into faculty members who also signed the declaration, according to Anadolu, in moves that could lead to dismissals.

“Criticism of government does not equal treason”, U.S. Ambassador John Bass said through the embassy’s Twitter account.

“PEN calls on Turkey to cease immediately its crackdown on dissident voices and act in accordance with its obligations to respect the right to freedom of expression”, it said in a statement. Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansour Turki said Fadli had not returned to Saudi Arabia since leaving the country in 1996. “You should be replaced by a new ambassador”. Markus Kaim from the Berlin Fund of Science and Politics says: “In the past, Turkey provided a zigzag policy on the terrorist group, considering it to be its tactic ally for overthrowing Bashar al-Assad’s regime”.

Attacks in Paris on November 13 which killed 130 people had already raised fears in Europe about Islamist militants entering undetected among the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in countries including Syria and Iraq.

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This prevented Erdogan from moving forward on his plan to change Turkey into a presidentially dominated republic instead of a parliamentary democracy.

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