BRUSSELS — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey gave the go-ahead on Friday for Finland’s application to join NATO, removing a significant hurdle for the Nordic nation’s bid to join the alliance but leaving its neighbor, Sweden, on the sidelines for now. “We decided to start the ratification process in our Parliament for Finland’s membership,” […]
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ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Beneath each fresh mound in this rapidly expanding graveyard lies a tragedy. One morning at dawn, Zeki Karababa told me about his. Karababa’s brother, Hamit; Hamit’s wife, Fatma; and two children, Ahmet, 10, and Evra, 3, had been crushed when their apartment building crumbled in the earthquake. But that was just the […]
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ISTANBUL — A coalition of parties seeking to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey anointed a veteran opposition politician on Monday as its presidential candidate just two months before elections that could drastically alter the country’s political and economic trajectory. The candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s largest opposition party, represents diverse political […]
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A 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey on Monday, killing at least one person and trapping others in collapsed buildings three weeks after a devastating quake struck the same region, leaving more than 50,000 people dead in the country and in neighboring Syria. The latest quake struck just after noon on Monday, south of the city […]
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ISTANBUL — Two dozen student volleyball players, four teachers and 12 parents visiting Turkey for a competition this month checked into the Grand Isias Hotel in the southern city of Adiyaman. When a powerful earthquake struck on Feb. 6, the building collapsed and killed dozens of people including everyone in the entourage except for four […]
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ISTANBUL — Just two weeks after the worst earthquake in more than 80 years devastated much of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, another powerful temblor struck the same region on Monday, once again collapsing buildings and claiming lives, and sowing panic among millions of people already traumatized by disaster. The quake struck at 8:04 p.m. […]
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ANKARA — When Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken first planned a trip to Turkey, it promised to be a difficult, even contentious diplomatic visit. Washington and Ankara have been at odds on several important issues, including Turkey’s ties to Russia, its refusal to allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO and the authoritarian drift […]
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Two weeks ago, Lutfiye Yuce hosted a 30th birthday party for her daughter Yesim in the southern Turkish city of Antakya. She bought an iced cake and invited a handful of neighbors. Three days later, the neighbors returned in the middle of the night to untangle Yesim from under her home, which had caved into the […]
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For miles around the small Turkish city of Erzin, the earth is shattered and buildings are razed, towns and cities turned into tombs of concrete by last week’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake. But Erzin still stands, an oasis of stability near the Mediterranean, where the question of why the city weathered the quake and a powerful aftershock […]
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A powerful earthquake last week catapulted Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad, into the global spotlight, creating an opportunity for him to inch further back onto the international stage through disaster diplomacy. As the death toll soared from the region’s deadliest quake in a century, Mr. al-Assad, long a pariah for bombing and torturing his own […]
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For about 200 hours, two Turkish brothers entombed under the rubble of a collapsed building in the earthquake-devastated city of Kahramanmaras held on, rationing bodybuilding supplements, drinking their own urine, swallowing gulps of air. “Breathing was easy,” one brother, Abdulbaki Yeninar, 21, told the local Ihlas news agency. “We took protein powder.” On Tuesday, rescue […]
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A week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, a severe shortage of tents, housing and medical supplies is imperiling relief efforts and posing new dangers to survivors, many of them injured or living outdoors in extreme cold. The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, with more than one million people […]
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One week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, shortages of key materials slowed relief efforts even as international aid arrived, and hospitals struggled to care for the large numbers of people requiring urgent help. The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, with more than a million people in Turkey alone […]
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ADIYAMAN, Turkey — The main thoroughfare feels like a construction site that sprawls out, block after block after block. But instead of putting up buildings, crews of workers, cranes, bulldozers and excavators are digging through the rubble of those that have collapsed in the hard-hit Turkish city of Adiyaman. Residents said rescue crews and aid […]
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GAZIANTEP, Turkey — A powerful earthquake struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people, exposing government incompetence and fueling an economic crisis. Amid the turmoil, a young, charismatic politician rode a wave of public anger to become prime minister in 2003. That politician was Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Now, as president, Mr. Erdogan faces […]
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Along the road, aid groups handed out boxes of bread, diapers, clothes, shoes and other supplies to the newly homeless. In the ancient city of Antakya in Hatay, buildings were largely in ruins, with its mosque, old bazaar and Protestant church wrecked by the quake. Large numbers of the city’s apartment blocks had collapsed, too, […]
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GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Rescue workers dug through rubble on Tuesday to find survivors of the most powerful and deadly earthquake to hit Turkey and Syria in decades, toiling in a vast and desperate search complicated by geography and geopolitics, freezing weather and the sheer scope of the disaster. Even as they struggled to free people […]
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The earthquakes were horrific on their own. First — shortly after 4 a.m. local time on Monday — came Turkey’s strongest quake in more than 80 years, followed hours later by an unusually powerful aftershock. The latest death count is more than 5,000 and will probably rise. Compounding the damage are three existing crises in […]
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The United States is stepping up efforts to persuade partner nations that have not joined Western sanctions on Russia to crack down on commercial activities in their countries that could be helping Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, U.S. officials said. Those efforts include pointing out to foreign governments transactions that the United States suspects are helping […]
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