Syria

When the Syrian Civil War began in March 2011, Turkey was still in its blissful mood of having “zero problems with neighbors.”

Jihadists shot down a Syrian warplane conducting strikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) stronghold of Raqa on Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

The influx into Turkey of more than a million Syrians fleeing their war-torn country has become a protracted situation that demands urgent new policies, according to the UNHCR’s representative in Ankara

Turkish men are drawn away from Turkish women with the slightest temptation. Now, they are after Syrian wives. It used to be Russian wives about a decade ago...

Syrian government air raids on a rebel-held area near Damascus killed 42 people, including seven children, a monitoring group said Friday, giving an updated toll.

An al-Qaeda-backed militant group that seized 45 U.N. peacekeepers two weeks ago on the Golan Heights has posted a video in which the hostages, from the South Pacific nation of Fiji, say they expect to be released soon.

Turkey is world famous for its hospitality. Yet the polls also show that Turks only like themselves; they don’t want, for instance, Jewish or Christian neighbors and there are not many foreign countries in the world that Turks feel sympathy for. This certainly shows Turkey’s inner contradictions.

By most measures, Turkey has been generous to the 1.36 million Syrians who fled there from the civil war to the south. The country hosts over a quarter of all Syrian refugees. It does so with far less foreign aid than its neighbors, meaning Turkish taxpayers shoulder a disproportionate cost .

I am often asked about the housing prices in Turkey lately. My questioners often want to confirm their sense that the housing bubble is going to burst, that a year or two down the line and they’ll be able to say “I told you so.” Have a look at the table below. It shows the increase in housing prices across Turkey between January 2010 and May 2014.

Syrian troops and Islamist rebels battled close to the armistice line with Israel in the Golan Heights on Sept. 1, as the U.N. pressed efforts to free 44 peacekeepers held by the insurgents.