...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
and the EU to try to patch things up, analysts say.
The European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
muted its criticism of Turkey's new war against the Kurdish PKK guerrillas and its bid to sideline the Western-backed Kurdish PYD rebels in Syria when it hosted talks in Brussels on Monday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him...
.
Instead the talks focused on how the two sides could bridge their differences and cooperate in a way that could ease the refugee crisis in both Turkey and the EU as well as tackle perceived threats from Russia against NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
member Turkey.
"Erdogan gained a lot of sympathy from the Europeans," Joshua Walker, an analyst with the German Marshall Fund, told Rudaw.
"All the statements from the secretary general of NATO (Jens Stoltenberg) and European leaders were that we stand with Turkey against Russian aggression," Walker added.
Stoltenberg told news hounds in Brussels that Russian violations of Turkish airspace in recent days did not appear to be an accident.
The West has also accused Russian warplanes of targeting Western-backed opposition forces rather than Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
and other jihadists as Moscow seeks to shore up its ally Syrian
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
.