Syria

The chances of a war erupting between Turkey and Syria appear to be rising. But the heated rhetoric of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government does not seem to be matched by public enthusiasm for conflict.

In a display of muscle-flexing, Turkish tanks this week carried out military exercises on the Syrian border, just a few kilometers away from towns that Syrian Kurds had seized from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Many ethnic Armenians are disgruntled after fleeing the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo for the safety of Armenia. They say they have been left to fend for themselves in the country they view as their ethnic homeland. Armenian government officials, meanwhile, insist they are doing what they can to accommodate diaspora members.

Although Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought his energy minister along on a one-day visit July 18 to Moscow, it’s safe to assume that rather than oil and gas prices, the question of how to resolve the crisis in Syria dominated the discussion between Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

With the escalation of civil warfare in Syria, the flow of refugees heading across the border into Turkey is set to pick up. Some observers in southern Hatay Province, which is the destination for the bulk of the refugees, caution that the influx raises the specter of sectarian tension on the Turkish side of the border.

When a senior Iranian official recently claimed that Tehran had captured a top Kurdish guerrilla leader, observers in Turkey feared the Kurdish insurgency had just taken an ugly turn.

They were once seen as bitter foes, but friendship with Syria and Iran has become a staple of Turkey's foreign policy in recent years.