[Produced with Reuters colleagues Orhan Coskun and Laila Bassam and published here on December 2, 2022]
BEIRUT/ANKARA, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Syria is resisting Russian efforts to broker a summit with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, three sources said on Friday, after more than a decade of bitter enmity since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war.
Continue reading[Published here on November 29, 2022]
BEIRUT, Nov 29 (Reuters) – The head of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Tuesday he still feared a Turkish ground invasion despite U.S. assurances and has demanded a “stronger” message from Washington after seeing unprecedented Turkish deployments along the border.
Continue reading[Published here on June 25, 2021]
BEIRUT, June 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Syrian refugee girls are increasingly at risk of child marriage due to a surge in pandemic-linked poverty, legal loopholes and long-term displacement in countries across the Middle East and North Africa, charity Save the Children said on Friday.
Continue reading[Produced with my colleague Shwan Mohammad in Sulaimaniyah and published here on October 1, 2020]
Turkey and Iran are increasingly adopting “game-changing” drones as their weapon of choice against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, prompting fears for the safety of civilians and stoking geopolitical tensions.
Continue reading
140journos send out requests for ballot report photos and review them in an Istanbul flat on March 31. Image via Ogulcan Ekiz
[Published here April 8, 2014]
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Spread around a tiny living room in an Istanbul flat are laptops, cell phones, projectors, and almost three dozen social media activists. This group, which spent all day monitoring Turkey’s contested local elections on March 30, re-assembled in a matter of hours after the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) declared its victory in the early morning of March 31. Their mission: to carry out a citizen-run investigation into election fraud.
Named after the 140-character limit on micro-blogging site Twitter, 140journos gained prominence after Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests last year. It has since grown to a network of over 300 citizen journalists, all volunteers, based throughout Turkey. The group uses Twitter, as well as Facebook and micro-video sites like Vine, to gather and verify local news. According to Ogulcan Ekiz, one of the group’s founding members, 140journos’ verification process has earned it the trust of much of Turkey’s youth, who see biases in traditional Turkish media.
MAYA GEBEILY 