Tag Archives: Turkey

Turkish prosecutors accuse newspaper of ‘asymmetric war’ on Erdogan

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters during a rally for the upcoming referendum in the Black Sea city of Rize, Turkey, April 3, 2017. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

By Tuvan Gumrukcu and Humeyra Pamuk

ANKARA/ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish prosecutors are seeking up to 43 years in jail for journalists from a leading opposition newspaper on charges of supporting a terrorist organization and targeting President Tayyip Erdogan through “asymmetric war methods”.

An indictment seen by Reuters on Wednesday said Cumhuriyet had effectively been “taken over” by the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed for a failed coup last July, and used to “veil the actions of terrorist groups”.

Turkey has purged more than 113,000 people from the police, judiciary, military and elsewhere since the coup attempt, and has closed more than 130 media outlets, raising concerns among Western allies about deteriorating rights and freedoms.

The authorities say the measures are justified by the gravity of the coup attempt, in which rogue soldiers tried to overthrow the government and Erdogan, killing more than 240 people, most of them civilians.

“(Cumhuriyet) started an intense perception operation targeting the government and president of the republic … through asymmetric war methods,” said the 324-page document, parts of which were published by Turkish media on Tuesday.

Cumhuriyet, long a pillar of the secularist establishment, is accused of straying from its principles in the years leading up to the coup attempt and of writing stories that serve “separatist manipulation”.

The indictment named 19 journalists, of whom 12 have already been detained, including well-known columnist Kadri Gursel, and Ahmet Sik, who once wrote a book critical of Gulen’s movement.

Three of the 19 could face up to 43 years in prison for “aiding an armed terrorist group without being members of it.”

The newspaper called the charges “imaginary accusations and slander” and said some of the testimonies in the indictment were from individuals previously seen as close to Gulen.

“Set them free immediately,” said its Wednesday front page.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

Prosecutors are seeking 15 years in prison for former editor Can Dundar, jailed in 2015 on charges of publishing state secrets involving Turkish support for Syrian rebels, but later released. Dundar lives in Germany.

Current editor Murat Sabuncu and other senior staff were arrested late last year over alleged support for the failed coup, sparking protests in Istanbul.

Social media posts including Tweets comprised the bulk of evidence in the indictment, along with allegations that staff had been in contact with users of Bylock, an encrypted messaging app the government says was used by Gulen’s followers.

Some suspects were accused of “serving the interests” of the PKK militant group, which has waged an insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast for three decades, and of the far-leftist DHKP/C, which was behind a series of armed attacks in recent years.

“There are lots of organizations in Turkey. The Gulenist organization, the PKK, DHKP-C. We are being blamed for helping them all… and it seems I am the prime suspect,” Dundar said in a video selfie on his website.

He said the fact Cumhuriyet staff had learned about the indictment in pro-government media was “another legal scandal.”

“I stand with all of them and I will continue to be their voice until the end,” he said on the website, which he set up from Germany to keep covering Turkish affairs.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Jon Boyle)

Turkey’s Erdogan calls on Iraqi Kurds to lower Kurdish flag in Kirkuk

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters during a rally for the upcoming referendum in the Black Sea city of Rize, Turkey, April 3, 2017. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on Iraqi Kurds to lower the Kurdish flag in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, warning that failure to do so would damage their relations with Turkey.

Kirkuk, one of Iraq’s disputed territories, has Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen populations. Kurdish peshmerga forces took control of it in 2014 when Islamic State overran around a third of Iraq and the army’s northern divisions disintegrated.

“We don’t agree with the claim ‘Kirkuk is for the Kurds’ at all. Kirkuk is for the Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds, if they are there. Do not enter into a claim it’s yours or the price will be heavy. You will harm dialogue with Turkey,” Erdogan said.

“Bring that flag down immediately,” he said at a rally in the Black Sea province of Zonguldak, where he was campaigning ahead of an April 16 referendum on constitutional changes that would broaden his powers.

Kurds have long claimed Kirkuk and its huge oil reserves. They regard the city, just outside their semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, as their historical capital.

The local Rudaw TV channel cited the governor of Kirkuk as saying that the Kurdistan flag should fly alongside the Iraqi national flag because the city is largely under the protection of Kurdish forces.

Turkey has long seen itself as the protector of Iraq’s Turkmen ethnic minority. Local media reported that leaders of Kirkuk’s Turkmen communities have rejected the raising of the Kurdish flag as against the constitution.

Turkey fears territorial gains by some Kurdish groups in Iraq and neighboring Syria could fuel Kurdish separatist ambitions inside Turkey, where PKK militants have fought an insurgency against the state for more than three decades.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler and Nick Tattersall)

Emotional reunion shows plight of Syria’s lost children

Hajar Saleh poses with her grandson Jaafar as she holds a picture depicting Jaafar's parents, Amina Saleh and her husband Imad Azouz who were killed fleeing Syria's civil war, at a garden in the Damascus district of Mezzeh,

By Dahlia Nehme

DAMASCUS (Reuters) – When Jaafar’s grandmother recognized him by his birthmark in a Turkish orphanage, months after his parents were killed fleeing Syria’s civil war, she held him tight, screaming for joy.

The story of how Hajar Saleh, a 47-year-old nurse, spent fraught weeks tracing her grandson in a foreign country and many months trying to bring him home underscores the terrible plight of Syria’s thousands of lost children and their families.

Jaafar was only three-months-old when his parents, Amina Saleh, 23, and her husband Imad Azouz, 25, decided to flee their home in the Sayeda Zeinab suburb of Damascus, close to a frontline, and seek a better life for their family abroad.

Palestinian refugees whose families had been in Syria for decades, they lacked legal travel documents, so they gathered their scant savings and paid a smuggler to guide them across the border into Turkey from an area held by Kurdish groups.

A last photograph Amina sent her mother before the attempted border crossing in January 2016 shows her smiling warily at the camera, wearing a heavy winter coat and black headscarf and holding Jaafar, a tiny pink baby in yellow romper suit.

But when they tried to cross the frontier a few hours later with dozens of other refugees in a smuggler convoy in northeast Syria, the Turkish border guards who battle Kurdish insurgents there opened fire. Amina and her husband were killed.

Little Jaafar escaped unscathed, protected by his father’s body, and was gathered up by survivors of the shooting and taken to the nearby Turkish city of Mardin, where they gave him into the care of a local judge.

Hajar’s account of the ill-fated border crossing comes from them and from what Turkish authorities told the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, she said.

Before they left Mardin, some of the refugees phoned Hajar to inform her of the fate of her daughter and son-in-law, and to give her the name and phone number of the judge, the start of her months-long odyssey to reclaim her grandson.

“I still have two sons, but Amina was my only daughter. My friend and secret keeper,” said Hajar apologetically, as if to justify her frequent sobbing and the black clothes of mourning she still wears for the dead couple.

LOST CHILDREN

UNICEF told Reuters in March it had documented the cases of 650 separated children in 2016 alone, but that the likely number of undocumented cases was probably far higher.

Since the war began in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and about half the country’s pre-war population made homeless, large numbers of them children.

After learning about her grandson’s plight, Hajar approached every local and international organization she could think of seeking help.

Eventually, UNICEF and the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR located Jaafar and secured travel documents for her to visit Turkey to pursue the legal process of proving kinship and claiming him.

“My daughter always came to me in my dreams and would beg me to bring her son back and raise him,” she said, speaking in the UNICEF headquarters in Damascus.

Little Jaafar, now 16-months-old, wide-eyed, smiling and well-groomed, was meanwhile snatching at everything in his reach and fidgeting to escape his grandmother’s lap for a few steps before quickly returning to her.

Hajar’s journey to the orphanage in Mardin was nearly over before it began, a victim to the chaos inflicted by the attempted coup d’etat in Turkey last summer, a day before she was scheduled to fly, which closed all the country’s airports.

With her Lebanese visa running out, Hajar only managed to fly to Ankara five days later with a day to spare before she would have been returned to Syria.

Unable to speak Turkish and having never traveled before, she was lost for five hours while changing flights in Istanbul before UNHCR officials found her and guided her onwards. After a 16-hour bus drive from Ankara, she finally reached Mardin.

REUNITED

As soon as Hajar saw Jaafar in the Cucuk Evleri Sitesi Mudurlugu orphanage, she recognized him by the prominent birthmark on his forehead, she said.

“I held him tight, crying and screaming in joy and I fainted afterwards,” she said. “When I woke up I held him tight again and sobbed. He stared at me. He didn’t cry or feel afraid. Instead he wiped my tears away,” she added.

With little money left and the weather turning colder, Hajar’s efforts to bring Jaafar home were further complicated by the Turkish government’s purge of the judiciary in the aftermath of the attempted coup, she said.

It took three months to prepare a DNA test and find a judge who could verify it and give her permission to take home her grandson.

“Every time a judge assumed my case, he would be replaced soon after,” she said.

The Turkish authorities told her where her daughter and son-in-law were buried in unmarked graves, but she was unable to visit them. Even when they finally tried to fly back in December, a blanket of heavy snow delayed their journey for days.

But now they have returned to her home in Sayeda Zeinab.

“Jaafar is full of energy and loves putting himself in trouble,” she said. “But for the sake of my daughter, I will raise him as well as I can.”

(Editing by Angus McDowall and Angus MacSwan)

Turkey trawled four continents for data on Erdogan foes: Austrian lawmaker

The Turkish flag is seen outside their embassy in Vienna, Austria, March 31, 2017. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger

By Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy

VIENNA (Reuters) – Turkish embassies on four continents submitted reports on alleged foreign-based opponents of President Tayyip Erdogan within a week of receiving a request from Ankara last September, according to documents released by an Austrian lawmaker.

The papers made public by opposition Greens politician Peter Pilz suggested a wider intelligence network than has so far been revealed by authorities investigating alleged spying by Turkey on its expatriates in three European countries.

“There is clearly a global network of informants. We cannot say exactly how long it took to build up this network. I assume that it happened in a matter of years,” Pilz told reporters.

A senior Turkish government official said: “These claims are completely false.”

Tensions are running high between Turkey and the European Union as Ankara tries to drum up support among expatriate Turks to vote ‘yes’ in a referendum on April 16 on whether to grant Erdogan sweeping new powers.

German, Austrian and Swiss authorities have all launched investigations into whether Turkey is conducting illegal espionage on their soil.

German prosecutors are investigating Halife Keskin, who leads the foreign affairs department of the Turkish state religious authority, the Diyanet, newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and two German broadcasters reported late on Friday.

Investigators have a document in which Keskin personally ordered the global surveillance effort and asked for any reports to be sent to him, according to the German media.

The German federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

An official at the Diyanet said Keskin was currently in Turkey and that while the Diyanet was aware of the German media reports, it had received no official notification from the German authorities that Keskin was being investigated.

Countries routinely post intelligence officers in their embassies, and the European authorities have not said in what ways the alleged Turkish activity went beyond acceptable levels of information-gathering by a foreign power.

Among the documents released by Pilz was a written call on Sept. 20, using the letterheads of the prime minister’s office and the Diyanet, for information on supporters of Erdogan’s arch-enemy Fethullah Gulen.

Turkey has accused Gulen of masterminding a failed coup attempt last July and has purged state institutions, schools, universities and the media of tens of thousands of suspected Gulen supporters. The cleric denies any involvement.

The documents, which Pilz said he had received from a Turkish source, showed embassies in over 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia sent reports to Diyanet on alleged Gulenists. Most were filed by religious attaches in Turkish embassies or consulates.

NAMES AND ADDRESSES

They typically listed the names and addresses of alleged Gulenists, as well as of publishing houses, media groups, educational centers and schools deemed to support the exiled cleric. Some reports include information on family members and the educational background of targeted people.

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the documents, but a source close to Austria’s government said it was safe to assume the ones on Austria were genuine.

Some reports, such as the one from Nigeria, include the names of middlemen responsible for building up ties between Gulenists and local power centers.

In the Austrian report, a Turkish official in Salzburg says an Austrian mosque umbrella group and other organizations have destroyed books, audio material, videos and newspapers deemed to be Gulenist.

The official says some gaps left by disappearing Gulenist organizations have been successfully filled with Erdogan-friendly replacements, such as after-school clubs.

A report from Azerbaijan names a journalist and some parliamentarians as sources of information on Gulenists. It names the director of a Turkish high school in Baku who will be reminded about the need to remove Gulenist teachers at his school.

An Australian report refers to “people who have lived in Australia for a long time and who know (the Gulenist) structure very well”. An entry from Mongolia describes activity by alleged Gulenists on Facebook and Twitter.

Turkey has rejected previous accusations that it was using religious bodies in Europe to spy on Erdogan critics.

In March, the religious attache of Turkey’s embassy in Austria told a local newspaper that mosque groups had a duty to check whether people of Turkish origin in Austria had been “radicalized” by Gulen. He said it was legitimate to deliver reports on such people.

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Berlin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Tillerson meets wife of U.S. pastor jailed in Turkey

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks during a news conference in Ankara, Turkey, March 30, 2017. REUTERS/Umit Bektas

ANKARA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with the wife of a jailed American pastor, Andrew Brunson, in the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday night, a State Department official said on Friday.

Brunson is a missionary who has been held in Turkey since October on charges of being part of a terrorist organization, according to news reports.

‎”Secretary of State Tillerson wanted to make sure he met with Mrs. Brunson to share the most recent information he had on Pastor Brunson’s case,” the official said.

“The Secretary ‎committed to staying in touch with Mrs. Brunson regarding the case moving forward,” the official said.

The pastor and his wife, Norine Brunson, were initially detained on immigration violation charges in October, when they were operating a small Christian church in the city of Izmir on Turkey’s western coast, media reports say.

Turkish media reports say Brunson has been charged with membership of the Gulenist Terror Organisation, the term which Turkish authorities uses to refer to the network of U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Ankara accuses Gulen and his followers of being behind an attempted coup in Turkey last July. Gulen rejects the allegations.

Tillerson was in Ankara to meet Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and senior government ministers for talks which focused on the conflict in neighboring Syria.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a joint news conference with Tillerson that Ankara expected Washington to take concrete steps on the extradition of Gulen, calling for his detention in the United States.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by David Dolan)

Turkey set for close vote on boosting Erdogan’s powers, polls suggest

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan greets the audience during a meeting in Ankara, Turkey March 29, 2017. Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Palace/Handout via REUTERS

By Ercan Gurses and Humeyra Pamuk

ANKARA/ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Less than three weeks before Turkey votes on sweeping new powers sought by President Tayyip Erdogan, opinion polls suggest a tight race in a referendum that could bring the biggest change to the system of governance in the country’s modern history.

Two senior officials from the ruling AK Party told Reuters that research it commissioned had put support for “yes” at 52 percent in early March, down from 55-56 percent a month earlier, though they expected a row with Europe in recent weeks to have fired up nationalists and bolstered their camp.

Turks will vote on April 16 on constitutional changes which would replace their parliamentary system with an executive presidency, a change Erdogan says is needed to avoid the fragile coalition governments of the past and to give Turkey stability as it faces numerous security challenges.

Publicly-available polls paint a mixed picture in a race that has sharply divided the country, with Erdogan’s faithful seeing a chance to cement his place as modern Turkey’s most important leader, and his opponents fearing one-man rule.

A survey on Wednesday by pollster ORC, seen as close to the government, put “yes” on 55.4 percent in research carried out between March 24-27 across almost half of Turkey’s 81 provinces.

By contrast, Murat Gezici, whose Gezici polling company tends to show stronger support for the opposition, told Reuters none of the 16 polls his firm had carried out over the past eight months had put the “yes” vote ahead. He expected a “no” victory of between 51-53 percent, based on his latest numbers.

None of the polls suggest the 60 percent level of support which officials in Ankara say Erdogan wants.

“Right now we have not seen a result in our polls that did not show the ‘yes’ vote ahead. But we want the constitutional reform to be approved with a high percentage for wider social consensus,” said AKP spokesman Yasin Aktay.

The wide disparity of the poll results is partly due to the political sympathies of Turkey’s polling companies.

But it also reflects a sense that a section of the public remains undecided, including some AKP loyalists uncomfortable with too much power being concentrated in Erdogan’s hands.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim held a meeting last week with former AKP ministers and officials, seeking to shore up wider support for the “Yes” campaign.

But former prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu and former president Abdullah Gul, both high-profile members of the AKP who fell out with Erdogan, did not show up and were also absent from the AKP’s campaign launch in late February.

“NO EARLY ELECTION”

Erdogan assumed the presidency, currently a largely ceremonial position, in 2014 after more than a decade as prime minister with the AKP, which he co-founded. Since then, pushing his powers to the limit, he has continued to dominate politics by dint of his personal popularity and forceful personality.

Critics accuse him of increasing authoritarianism with the arrests and dismissal of tens of thousands of judges, police, military officers, journalists and academics since a failed military coup in July.

With the constitutional overhaul, the president would be able to retain ties to a political party, potentially allowing Erdogan to resume his leadership of the AKP, a move that opposition parties say would wreck any chance of impartiality.

Abdulkadir Selvi, a pro-government columnist in the Hurriyet newspaper, said the latest numbers presented to the AKP headquarters showed the lead for the “yes” campaign widening, boosted partly by Erdogan’s row with Europe.

Bans on some campaign rallies by Turkish officials in Germany and the Netherlands have prompted Erdogan to accuse European leaders of “Nazi methods”.

“The stance of the Netherlands and Germany is expected to motivate nationalist voters at home and abroad and add 1-1.5 percentage points to the ‘yes’ vote,” Selvi wrote on Thursday.

The constitutional changes envisage presidential and parliamentary elections being held together in 2019, with a president eligible to then serve a maximum of two five-year terms. Those elections could be called early if Erdogan wins the referendum, enabling him to assume full executive powers sooner.

But AKP officials said such a move was unlikely, citing concern that a slowing economy could weaken their parliamentary majority and pointing to voter fatigue after four elections in the past three years.

“Whether there is a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ vote in the referendum, leaving this parliamentary majority to have another election does not make sense for us,” a senior AKP official said.

(Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Daren Butler in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Tillerson seeks to keep focus on Islamic State in delicate Turkey visit

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, accompanied by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (3rd R), meets with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (3rd L) in Ankara. Hakan Goktepe/Prime Minister's Press Office/Handout via REUTERS

By Lesley Wroughton

ANKARA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held talks with Turkey’s leaders on Thursday in a one-day visit to a NATO ally crucial to the fight against Islamic State but increasingly at odds with Washington and its European partners.

Tillerson held a closed-door meeting with President Tayyip Erdogan at which he was expected to discuss the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State, including the planned offensive against its Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, where Turkey has been angered by U.S. support for Kurdish militia fighters.

He earlier met Prime Minister Binali Yildirim and discussed efforts to defeat Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Yildirim’s office said. A U.S. State Department official said Tillerson had emphasized Turkey’s “important role” in regional security.

Erdogan has been incensed by Washington’s readiness to work with the Kurdish YPG militia in the fight against Islamic State. Ankara sees the YPG as an extension of PKK militants who have fought a three-decade insurgency inside Turkey and are deemed a terrorist group by the United States and European Union.

U.S.-Turkish relations have also been strained by the continued presence in the United States of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Erdogan for a failed coup last July and whom Ankara wants extradited.

Ties soured under former U.S. President Barack Obama and officials in Ankara have been hoping for a reset under President Donald Trump. But there have been few signs of improvement.

Tillerson’s visit comes less than three weeks ahead of a referendum at which Erdogan is seeking constitutional change to boost his powers, a move which his opponents and some European allies fear will bring increasing authoritarianism.

Senior U.S. officials have said Tillerson will not meet the Turkish opposition during the visit, a sign that he will seek to avoid discussion of domestic issues while trying to keep the focus on the fight against Islamic State.

But his trip has been further clouded by the arrest in New York on Monday of an executive of Turkey’s state-run Halkbank <HALKB.IS>, who is accused of conspiring in a multi-year scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Shortly after Tillerson’s arrival in Ankara, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag told broadcaster A Haber that the arrest was a “completely political move” designed to tarnish Turkey and Erdogan, and questioned the evidence in the case.

Tillerson is expected to say the arrest of Halkbank deputy General Manager Mehmet Hakan Atilla is a matter for the U.S. justice authorities and not political. He is hoping his visit can focus instead on the campaign to retake Raqqa.

U.S. officials say Tillerson, who has said the number one priority in Syria for President Donald Trump’s administration is defeating Islamic State, will emphasize the importance of Kurdish YPG forces in the Raqqa offensive.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

Germany tells Turkey not to spy on Turks living on its soil

Turkish voters living in Germany wait to cast their ballots on the constitutional referendum at the Turkish consulate in Berlin, Germany, March 27, 2017. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

By Madeline Chambers

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany will not tolerate foreign espionage on its territory, the interior minister said on Tuesday, in a robust response to media reports that Turkish secret services were spying on supporters of the Gulen movement in Germany.

Fethullah Gulen, a U.S-based Muslim cleric with a large following in Turkey, is accused by Ankara of orchestrating a failed military coup last July. Ankara has purged state institutions, schools and universities and the media of tens of thousands of suspected supporters of the cleric.

The media reports of Turkish espionage in Germany have deepened a rift between the NATO allies in the run-up to a referendum next month in Turkey that proposes to significantly expand the powers of President Tayyip Erdogan.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and two broadcasters reported that Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency had given Germany’s foreign intelligence service a list of names of hundreds of supposed Gulen supporters living in Germany.

Interior Minster Thomas de Maiziere, speaking in Passau in southern Germany, said he was not surprised by the report and added that the lists would be looked at individually.

“We have told Turkey several times that such (activity) is not acceptable,” he said. “Regardless of what you think of the Gulen movement, German law applies here and citizens who live here won’t be spied on by foreign states,” he said.

The reports said the list included the names of more than 300 people and more than 200 associations, schools and other institutions and a German investigation indicated some of the photos may have been taken secretly.

WARNING

The northern state of Lower Saxony even said it was warning suspected Gulen movement supporters about possible reprisals if they traveled to their homeland.

“I think that is a justified and necessary measure to be able to warn people,” said state interior minister Boris Pistorius. “The intensity and ruthlessness being (used) on people living on foreign soil is remarkable.”

Concerns about Turkish spying are not confined to Germany.

Swedish public service radio broadcaster SR reported that Turkey’s ruling AK Party was putting pressure, via the Union of European Turkish Democrats, on Swedish Gulen supporters to supply information about fellow Gulen supporters in the country.

Germany is already investigating possible spying by Turkish imams in Germany.. A spokesman for the chief federal prosecutor’s office said that probe continued.

German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, are angry about Erdogan’s repeated comparisons of their country to Nazi Germany in response to cancellations of planned campaign events targeting the Turkish diaspora in Germany. Germany says the cancellations were prompted by security concerns.

The speaker of the Bundestag lower house of parliament said in a speech late on Monday that Turkey was turning into an authoritarian system and that its president was effectively staging a coup against his own country.

Norbert Lammert, a member of Merkel’s conservatives, said the referendum was about “transforming an undoubtedly fragile but democratic system into an authoritarian system – and this second coup attempt may well be successful”.

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers, Reuters TV, Andrea Shalal, Hans-Edzard Busemann and Daniel Dixon in Stockholm; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Israel urges citizens to leave Egypt’s Sinai, citing IS threat

A general view shows Israel's border fence with Egypt's Sinai peninsula (R), as seen from Israel's Negev Desert

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel on Monday urged citizens vacationing in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula to leave immediately, saying the threat of attacks inspired by Islamic State and other jihadi groups was high.

The advisory was issued ahead of the Passover holiday, when thousands of Israelis cross the land border with Egypt to visit resorts and beaches on the Sinai’s Red Sea coast.

Israel’s Anti-Terrorism Directorate said its “Level 1” alert related to a “very high concrete threat”.

“Islamic State and those inspired by it are at the forefront of global jihadi groups that are highly motivated to carry out attacks during this period,” the directorate wrote.

“All Israelis currently in the Sinai should return and … (we) also strongly advise that those wanting to travel to Sinai should not do so.”

An Islamist insurgency in the rugged, thinly populated Sinai has gained pace since Egypt’s military toppled President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.

Militants have launched a number of deadly cross-border attacks on Israel in recent years.

Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. The directorate on Monday refreshed standing warnings for other countries, including Jordan and Turkey.

(Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Roche)

Migrant boat sinks off Turkish coast, 11 dead: DHA

Lifeguards from the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms sanitise five dead bodies of migrants on-board the former fishing trawler Golfo Azzurro following a search and rescue operation in central Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast, March 24, 2017. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

ANKARA (Reuters) – A plastic boat carrying 22 migrants sank off Turkey’s Aegean coastal town of Kusadasi on Friday, killing 11 people and leaving four missing, the Dogan news agency (DHA) said.

Television footage showed bodies washed up on a beach near the town. Rescuers managed to save seven people from the stricken vessel and the coast guard was searching for any other survivors, Dogan said.

A deal between Turkey and the European Union on curbing illegal migration, struck a year ago, helped reduce the migrant influx to Europe via Greek islands to a trickle. But some are still trying to make the perilous voyage across the Aegean.

Just 3,629 refugees and migrants have crossed to Greece from Turkey so far this year, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, and about 60 arrive on Greek islands each day. At least 173,000 people, mostly Syrians, arrived in 2016.

Europe’s deteriorating relations with Turkey could endanger the deal, under which Ankara helps control migration in return for the promise of accelerated EU membership talks and aid.

President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that Turkey would review all political and administrative ties with the EU after an April referendum, including the migrant deal.

Erdogan has been angered by Germany and the Netherlands cancelling planned rallies on their territory by Turkish officials seeking to drum up support for a “yes” vote in the referendum, which could lead to constitutional changes extending the powers of the presidency.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara and Karolina Tagaris in Athens; Writing by Nick Tattersall)