– Adıyaman in southeast Turkey was one of the worst hit and least supported provinces after two devastating earthquakes in 2023, and yet it re-elected Erdoğan in the presidential elections that year. I reported on why locals voted against change and followed the years-long search for a missing lawyer to show how trauma, rumors and bureaucratic violence continue to affect the survivors.
– As the arms market is globalizing, production hubs are shifting from traditional arms making countries to newcomers like the Turkey and the UAE. While Turkish companies are pushing the limits of accessible and affordable quality firearms, investors in Abu Dhabi are attracting leading weapons engineers to their shores.
– As the economy around them withers, some of the most disadvantaged workers in Turkey have gone on massive wildcat strikes with differing degrees of success. Two young delivery workers make sense of their defeat a year on, and Syrian textile workers share why they stand with their Turkish colleagues in defending their basic rights.
– Alevis in Turkey are constantly redefining their syncretic traditions, without a text or centralized body to set the rules. One woman is trying to revive what she argues is a historic practice of women leading cem ceremonies.
– The two earthquakes that flattened swathes of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, 2023 left rescuers scrambling to stop a steeply climbing death toll. I recount my nightmarish first week as a search and rescue volunteer in Islahiye, near Gaziantep.
– The covid-19 pandemic offered a moment to reflect on other kinds of hospital models that have been resigned to history. The stories of five non-Muslim communal hospitals in Istanbul — from their foundation and to their fate today — remind us that hospitals were once sites of healing in a sense much larger than curing an illness.
– A 2011 law to return the confiscated lands of religious minorities in Turkey was meant to settle a century of property disputes. In many cases in Istanbul, notably of one Armenian hospital foundation, it accelerated their destruction.
– When record-breaking wildfires hit Turkey’s Aegean coast, the national debate revolved around who sparked the fires and who failed to put them out. I went to the scene as a volunteer first responder and saw what was behind these speculations.
– A 2016 peace agreement in Colombia emptied a cordillera village of the FARC. The dam project that moved in brought with it another iteration of violence between the state, locals and the war-torn environment.
Naomi Cohen | journalist 