RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the last four years, more than 100 Christian pastors and other religious officials have been deported from Turkey, and banned from reentering.

“When Jesus reached 30 years of age, Allah gave him the duty of being a prophet. He then began inviting people to believe in Allah.” — Turkish textbook on Christianity.

“[R]eligious minority students are faced with the option of taking the class or sitting alone somewhere else on the school premises during the classes, thus separating them from their peers and singling out their religious differences.” — U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkey Textbook Report.

It is high time that the activists of the global “human rights community” condemned or at least publicly discussed this “culture of hate” in the Muslim communities — and particularly the Christianophobia.

American pastors in Turkey are being arrested hand over fist.

American Pastor Andrew Brunson, of the Resurrection Protestant Church, was arrested in Izmir (Smyrna)on October 7 alongside his wife, Norine Lyn Brunson, for “threatening the national security of Turkey.” Brunson is expected to be deported in 15 days. The couple is still being held in detention.

Turkish authorities also seized the residence permit of Ryan D. Keating, an American student pursuing a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Ankara University. Keating is a Christian who heads the Ankara Refugee Ministry for the Kurtulus Church. While he was leaving Turkey for work purposes, he was told at the airport that his residence permit in Turkey had been cancelled in September for “national security”, meaning that he will not be able to reenter the country. His wife and children are still in Ankara.

Yet another American Protestant pastor, Patrick Jansen, was not allowed to reenter Gaziantep, where he served. And still another American Protestant was ordered to leave Turkey upon landing at the airport.

They are not the first. In the last four years, more than 100 Christian pastors and other religious officials have been deported from Turkey — the visas of some of them were not renewed or were completely cancelled. They have been banned from reentering.

Pastor Brunson had also been exposed to an armed attack in front of the church in 2011, by a Turkish Muslim from the city of Manisa who shouted: “Al-Qaeda will bring you to account”, called members of the congregation “traitors” and threatened them with “bombing the church in Manisa.”

In the meantime, the Protestant Life Bridge Church, in the southern city of Antakya (Antioch), has been closed and sealed upon a complaint of the National Education Directorate and the order of the governor’s office for “giving education illegally.” The church, officials of which are also American citizens, was giving Bible lessons to its members.

The congregation has started looking for a new place to hold their Sunday services, the Turkish Christian news channel SAT-7 TURK reported on October 8.

The Protestant community in Turkey has been exposed to discrimination and persecution for a long time.

According to a global report by the organization Open Doors,

BEIJING—Ahead of a top-level Communist Party conclave, Chinese President Xi Jinping is sending an unmistakable signal about what he expects from the tens of millions in the party’s ranks: total loyalty.

Culminating a weekslong state-media blitz hailing the sacrifice of Communist forces that trekked thousands of miles in the mid-1930s to find a haven to continue their revolution, Mr. Xi on Friday called for an equal display of commitment. “In our Long March of today, we must strengthen the party’s leadership, persist with strict party discipline,” he said in a speech carried on national television and emblazoned across the web.

His rallying cry was also a warning. As China’s ruling party braces for a year of intense political jostling ahead of a major leadership shuffle, its leader will brook no dissent within party ranks.

When more than 300 top party officials gather Monday for a four-day policy meeting themed on discipline, Mr. Xi’s own clout will also come in for a test. The Central Committee’s closed-door plenum comes after an anticorruption drive that has punished more than a million officials over nearly four years, and ahead of a party congress due late 2017 that will be his chance to install his allies in top posts.

The plenum “marks the start of a critical year” for the party, as it grapples with uncertainties in leadership transition and pushback against Mr. Xi’s domineering style, said Matthias Stepan, a specialist in Chinese domestic politics at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.

Already, more than a dozen provincial party chiefs have been replaced in the past six months, with some succeeded by up-and-coming officials seen as being close to Mr. Xi. Speculation has also grown within party ranks over whether Mr. Xi may break from existing retirement norms to keep his anticorruption chief, Wang Qishan, in office.

Such a move, analysts say, may destabilize a party already wary of Mr. Xi’s stature as China’s most dominant leader in decades. Discord at the party’s highest levels spilled into the open this summer, when Mr. Xi and China’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang, disagreed over economic policies, creating confusion among officials as they grappled with a slowing economy.

Mr. Xi has cashiered generals and is putting the politically powerful military through its most thoroughgoing reorganization in a half-century. Restructuring is also being pushed onto large state-owned industries, some of which have resisted, leading to a reminder from Mr. Xi this month that they must obey the party.

Turkish air and ground forces are attacking northern Syria. The target is not ISIS – the presumed threat to Turkish interests – but rather Kurdish forces that have borne the brunt of anti-ISIS ground fighting and are key to the battle for Mosul in Iraq.

Since the July aborted coup in Ankara, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been making internal war against what it calls the “Gülenist threat,” followers of Turkish cleric Fetullah Gülen, who Erdoğan believes engineered the coup. Tens of thousands of Turks have been arrested, dismissed from their jobs, and otherwise harassed. Turkey has also been conducting an external war – either overtly or by proxy – to control sensitive areas of Iraq and Syria and short-circuit any possibility of Kurdish independence or large-scale autonomy emerging from the wreckage of wars in both those countries.

After shelling Kurdish positions just north of Aleppo, the Turkish Air Force bombed headquarters, ammunition dumps, and shelters. Turkish sources claimed 200 dead; Kurdish sources said 10 people were killed. They were PKK, said the Turks – members of the Peoples Workers Party, which has carried out operations inside Turkey for decades. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), however, said in a statement that the airstrikes targeted fighters from the YPG-affiliated Jaish al-Thuwar (Revolutionary Front), which was advancing against ISIS in the city of Ifrin.

Turkey makes little distinction among Kurdish groups. The U.S. takes a different tack, agreeing that the PKK is a terrorist organization but arming and training the YPG and finding it the most effective force on the ground fighting ISIS. A U.S. official says the particular Kurds targeted this time were not among those we have trained, so there were no Americans in the area of Turkish fire. This time. But the possibility of direct U.S.-Turkish confrontation is rising daily.

There has been little mention of Turkey’s wars in the American press, aided by the fact that militias, rebel armies, terrorist groups, and sub-state actors sound like alphabet soup: FSA, PKK, PYD, YPG, JAN, ISIS, AQI, and more fight in Syria and Iraq. Even when they have names, Americans are likely to find themselves confused. How does Jaish al-Thuwar relate to the Khalid ibn al-Walid Brigade, or the Free Syrian Army or the Authenticity and Development Group, the Sun Battalion, the Al-Qousi Brigade, or the Truthful Promise Brigade?

Confusion is serving Turkey well.

The much-heralded offensive against ISIS in Mosul by the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias may succeed in capturing Iraq’s second largest city. It is unlikely to result in the destruction of the Islamic State’s fighting capacity, however. It is even less likely to lead to the establishment of stable and permanent government control over Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, which has Mosul at its northern tip.

The importance of Mosul is clear. It is a major population center of over two million (before the war) and the pivot that intersects the east-west line of communication from the Syrian border to the north-south axis that leads to Baghdad, 250 miles to the south. The first question, which has not been adequately considered in mainstream media reports, concerns the battle readiness of government forces. In June 2014 the Iraqi army collapsed and fled without a fight when ISIS attacked Mosul, although it was vastly superior to the attackers in numbers and equipment. The high command in Baghdad was unable to maintain any semblance of command and control, even though the U.S. had spent some 20 billion dollars on arming, training and equipping it in preceding years. Its mostly Shiite soldiers were uninterested in fighting for Sunni-majority areas which they did not regard as their own. It was unable to develop any sense of loyalty or common purpose among its non-Shia recruits, who deserted en masse.

It is unclear what if anything has changed over the past two years and four months to shift the balance. The personnel, equipment, training and doctrine are still largely the same. Early signs were not encouraging. On the first day of the current offensive it took the Iraqi army six hours of fierce combat to push back a platoon-sized IS unit from Ibrahim Khalil, a village 20 miles south of Mosul. The jihadists came back and retook the village during the night: “No reinforcements showed up so when they attacked we had to retreat from the five villages we captured on Tuesday. We ended up right back where we started,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammed Hadi. “We took back three today but we can’t advance further towards Mosul until the others arrive.” This episode bodes ill for the future of a complex operation which requires precise planning and coordination. Subsequent army claims of battlefield successes, such as the taking of the city of Bartella on October 21, may reflect the unwillingness of ISIS to give battle in open plains south of the city where its fighters would be at an obvious disadvantage.

The Islamophobia that Erdogan never ceases to claim exists in the Western world may or may not be a real social malady, but non-Muslimphobia in Turkey is increasingly a contagious malady.

“Traitors! We’ll bomb your church!” — The words of Mehmet Ali Eren, suspected al-Qaeda member, as he attacked Protestant Pastor Andrew Craig Brunson in Izmir, Turkey.

Erdogan should explain why he persistently demands more and more tolerance for Muslims living in non-Muslim lands, including the building of mosques in every capital, while his government can deport Pastor Brunson and his wife on the spurious grounds that they pose a security threat to his country. The police explained that they were being expelled on grounds of posing a security threat because they had carried out “missionary activity and received money from sources abroad.”

Over the past several years Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pressured Greece to construct a mosque in Athens. He has criticized the country which boasts the only European capital without a mosque. He does not hide his passion for mosques worldwide.

In 2015 Erdogan proposed the construction of a mosque in secular, Communist-ruled Cuba. Also in 2015, he went to Moscow for the inauguration of the biggest mosque in the Russian capital.

Earlier this year Erdogan pleasantly announced his presence at the opening of the biggest mosque in Amsterdam. The mosque is called “Hagia Sophia,” named after a Greek Orthodox Christian basilica built in 537 AD in Constantinople, reflecting the typical Muslim extremist obsession with “conquest.” Recently Erdogan has also been eyeing Iraq.

As recently as April, Erdogan attended the opening ceremony of a culture center and mosque in Maryland, United States. The complex, the only one in the United States to feature two minarets, was constructed in the style of 16th century Ottoman architecture, with a central dome, half domes and cupolas, echoing Istanbul’s Suleymaniye Mosque. At the ceremony, Erdogan said: “Unfortunately, we are going through a rough time all around the world. Intolerance towards Muslims is on the rise not only here in the United States but also around the globe.” Intolerance toward Muslims?

LONDON—A fleet of Russian warships, including the country’s sole aircraft carrier, sailed through the English Channel on Friday in a very public display of naval might after European leaders again called on Moscow to stop its attacks on Aleppo, Syria.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense said two Royal navy ships, the frigate HMS Richmond and destroyer HMS Duncan, were escorting the Russian ships as they sailed in international waters down the U.K.’s eastern seaboard. The Russian ships, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and nuclear powered Kirov Class battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy, are thought to be heading for the Mediterranean Sea.

European Union leaders at a two-day summit in Brussels held off on threatening Russia with sanctions for supporting the Assad regime’s siege of Aleppo following objections from Italy. Instead, EU leaders said all options remained on the table if the bombing continues.

Jens Stoltenberg, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary-general, said Thursday he was concerned about the deployment of a Russian aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean possibly taking part in strikes on Aleppo. Mr. Stoltenberg said the alliance’s navies would monitor the Russian ships as they travel to the Mediterranean.

U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Thursday at a defense conference in London that the Russian deployment was, “clearly designed to test the alliance,” adding that the ships would be “marked every step of the way” by British and NATO ships.

Islamic State militants set fire to sulfur stocks outside an industrial plant south of Mosul earlier this week, the U.S. military confirmed Saturday, creating a plume of noxious smoke that has drifted over nearby towns and a U.S. military base, forcing some troops to put on gas masks as a precaution.

Militants set the residue alight at the Mishraq industrial plant as a tactical measure to slow Iraqi military advances in the offensive to recapture Mosul, adding to oil-well fires started weeks ago and still burning in Qayara. The combination is now affecting the nearby U.S. base as shifting winds blow the smoke toward the troops.

“Daesh ignited toxic sulfur residue stored at al-Mishraq (south of Mosul) in an attempt to disrupt the ISF advance,” Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, said in a statement, using another name for Islamic State. He added that the military is now assessing the risk to U.S. troops because of the multiple fires.

It is unclear whether officers or senior troops ordered soldiers to put on the masks or if the troops chose to do so themselves as a precaution.