Author: Serdar Imren

In a staggering display of the Turkish state’s assault on free expression, a 62-year-old woman has been sentenced to nearly a year in prison. Her crime was not one of violence or slander, but of political satire: holding a banner that cleverly repurposed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s own loaded language against him. The case represents a new low in the government’s war on dissent, demonstrating how even the most nuanced forms of protest are now met with the full, disproportionate force of the law. The court’s decision sends a clear and chilling message: in Erdoğan’s Turkey, the president is beyond…

“In Turkey, journalists now spend more time in courtrooms than in newsrooms.” A Western diplomat’s bitter observation, shared in confidence, perfectly captures the grim reality of press freedom under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The courthouse corridor has become the forced habitat of Turkish journalism, a place where reporters are not covering the news, but have become the story itself—defendants in a war against truth. This is not hyperbole. The statistics are a testament to a systematic purge: in a single year, 500 journalists were dismissed from their jobs, 70 were physically attacked, and thousands have been prosecuted under a law…

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s notorious intolerance for dissent was brazenly exported to the streets of the American capital, as his personal security detail physically and verbally assaulted journalists and protesters outside a prestigious Washington think tank. The incident provided a shocking, firsthand look at the brutal tactics used to silence critics in Turkey, now deployed on US soil. The confrontations erupted as Erdoğan prepared to speak at the Brookings Institution. His bodyguards, exhibiting the same aggression seen on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, moved to suppress any form of protest. Amberin Zaman, a respected Turkish journalist with the Woodrow…

When President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cited Hitler’s Germany as a model for an effective presidential system, his office was quick to claim the media had “distorted” his words. Yet, for the editor-in-chief of the country’s most influential newspaper, Hürriyet, simply reporting on the President’s controversial statements was enough to face a potential five-year prison sentence for “insult.” In Erdoğan’s Turkey, the assault on free speech has moved far beyond a “worrying” trend; it has become a systematic and ruthless campaign to crush all forms of opposition. The judiciary, once a pillar of the republic, now operates as a weapon of…

The Republic of Turkey is undergoing possibly its greatest crisis since the founding of the state nearly a century ago. Present trends suggest worse to come as a long-time Western ally evolves into a hostile dictatorship.