Turkey

The bodies of the remaining five victims at the Ermenek coal mine were recovered overnight on Dec. 3, ending 38 days of painstaking search efforts.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu will visit Greece for two days beginning Dec. 3 amid tensions over energy deposits in the eastern Mediterranean.

The two-day talks between Turkey and Greece are part of confidence-building measures launched in 2010 to improve relations between the Aegean neighbors.

The Turkish government is working on a draft reform bill allowing Alevis to choose their own religion courses at school and give their places of worship the same rights as mosques.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by a large delegation including 10 ministers, visited Turkey on Dec. 1 to attend the fifth session of the High-Level Cooperation Council (HLCC), an inter-governmental mechanism designed to oversee the cooperation between the two countries and eliminating bureaucratic barriers to enhance it.

A stigma relating to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has attached itself to Turkey and refuses to go away. The belief around the world, including part of the Middle East, as well as among Turkish opposition parties, is that Ankara is somehow complicit in the rise of this group and continues to support it.

Turkey will not land its second free trade agreement in South America before the end of 2014, a Peruvian official confirmed late Dec. 2.

Turkish president ramps up his criticism of international institutions Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has continued his criticism of various international institutions, claiming that “even the Nobel Prize is not awarded objectively.”

Many media outlets claimed that ISIL launched its first attack from Turkey on Nov. 29. Did it really? Two fresh statements seem to draw a new picture "ISIS launches attack on Kobani from inside Turkey for first time," claimed a headline in The Guardian on Nov. 29.

A second contingent of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters streamed across the Syrian border from Turkey late Dec. 2 to join the fight against jihadists for the strategic Syrian town of Kobane.

An unorthodox step by Russia, Turkey's largest natural gas provider, to cancel a giant gas project has come on the heels of an official deal in its southern neighbor, Iraq, easing an internal conflict over oil exports, reshuffling the cards in the region's energy distribution paradigm.