TURKEY

Mr. Dink’s killer was convicted and sentenced in July 2011. On Jan. 17, 2012, an Istanbul court also convicted a militant ultranationalist of instigating Mr. Dink’s murder and sentenced him to life in prison. But it acquitted 18 defendants on charges that they were part of a larger conspiracy behind the killing. Prosecutors filed an appeal.

Public outrage against the ruling focused on what many people see as the strength of illegal factions within the government and the lack of political will that obstructed an in-depth investigation into the murder.

Threat from Kurdish Separatists

Turkey still faces a challenge from Kurdish separatist rebels. In October 2011, after months of increasing violence, Kurdish militants killed at least 24 Turkish soldiers and Turkey’s military responded by sending 10,000 troops backed by warplanes into northern Iraq.

The attack came as the country was drafting a new Constitution with greater rights for ethnic minorities, an effort widely perceived as designed to end Kurdish separatist violence that has claimed more than 40,000 lives since the 1980s.

In December 2011, the Turkish military said that it had accidentally killed at least 35 Turkish cigarette smugglers in airstrikes after mistaking them for separatist fighters in the Kurdish border region with Iraq. Most of the dead were between 17 and 20 years old.

The incident set off violent protests in Istanbul and other cities. On Jan. 2, 2012, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said that Turkey would compensate the families of those who were killed.

Support of the Insurgency in Syria

Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting the Free Syrian Army, an armed opposition group that is waging an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The group conducts attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military.

As the crisis continues in Syria, with government forces killing an estimated 3,500 demonstrators, Turkey has severed its ties, calling on Mr. Assad to step down. 

In late November, Turkish officials said they would consider having their military cross the border to impose a safety zone if the Assad government failed to stop killing citizens demanding democratic changeOn Nov. 30 Turkey also took steps to freeze the Syrian government’s financial assets, impose a travel ban on senior Syrian regime officials and cut off transactions with the country’s central bank, sharply escalating international pressure on Damascus.

These measures, Turkish officials said, were enacted in concert with the Arab League, which has imposed broad trade sanctions and are part of a developing international effort to strangle Syria’s economy and severely diminish the power of its government.

Earthquake in Eastern Turkey

On Oct. 23, 2011, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 hit near the city of Van, not far from the country’s border with Iran. The earthquake left about 3,700 buildings uninhabitable, according to the government’s disaster-relief center in Ankara, the capital. Poor construction was blamed for the scope of the disaster, in which about 600 people died.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 10, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the same region killing at least seven people and trapping others who had moved into damaged buildings that collapsed.

Reports said that about 25 buildings, including two hotels, were destroyed in the 5.6-magnitude earthquake. Many of the buildings were empty, according to a television report on NTV, but some people had moved into the hotels after their homes were flattened or deemed unsafe after the earlier 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

Military Commanders in Crisis

In July 2011, Turkey was plunged into a political crisis when the nation’s top military commanders tendered letters of retirement suddenly and en masse in a dramatic signal of deepening tensions between the armed forces and the government.

A week later, the civilian leadership appointed four new commanders, decisively strengthening its control over its armed forces. The new appointments of a chief of general staff and commanders of the army, navy and air force reflected the Islamic-leaning civilian government’s increased assertiveness in its struggle with the country’s military establishment, which has orchestrated three coups since 1960 and forced another government from power in 1997.

While the military appointees resemble their predecessors in background and experience, their rise is the start of what many have predicted to be a new era of civilian dominance in Turkey. Civilian control of the military is an important requirement for membership in the European Union.

Since taking office in 2002, Mr. Erdogan has rolled back the military’s political power, largely through legal and other reforms. But perhaps the single biggest blow to the military’s clout came in the form of a sprawling series of trials in which a number of senior military commanders have been charged with conspiring to overthrow Mr. Erdogan’s government.

The military has been seen for a century as the ultimate guardian of the secular tradition forged by the founder of the modern nation, Kemal Ataturk. In the process it became allied with the country’s urban, secular elite. Mr. Erdogan’s conservative, Islamicist movement, with its roots in rural areas and small cities, has challenged both.

His party’s strong victory in parliamentary elections in June 2011 left critics worried about a further consolidation of power after nearly a decade of rule. The election returns gave the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., its third term in office since it first won a parliamentary majority in 2002. The results, however, failed to provide the absolute majority that the party wanted to push for major changes, including a shift to a presidential system and the drafting of a new constitution.

Diplomatic Breach With Israel

In May 2010, a deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish protest flotilla bound for Gaza nearly severed diplomatic relations. Turkey demanded an official apology, compensation to victims’ relatives and a lifting of the blockade on Gaza as conditions for normalizing its heavily strained relations; so far, Israel has decided not to apologize. In September 2011, Turkey downgraded its diplomatic and military ties and expelled Israel’s ambassador.

Turkey once ranked as Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world. The latest move stopped just short of a complete breach in diplomatic relations but nonetheless seemed likely to deepen the already profound alienation between the two countries.

Assertive Foreign Policy

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as at cross-purposes with it. From Turkey’s perspective, it is simply finding its footing in its own backyard, a troubled region that has been in turmoil for years, in part as a result of American policy making.

For decades, Turkey was one of the United States’ most pliable allies, a strategic border state on the edge of the Middle East that reliably followed American policy. Of late, it has asserted a new approach, its words and methods as likely to provoke Washington as to advance its own interests. Sensing a decline of American power in the region, Turkish officials have become sharply more assertive, priding themselves on keeping open channels to virtually every party.

The change in Turkey’s policy burst into public view in June 2010, after the deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish flotilla, which nearly severed relations with Israel, Turkey’s longtime ally. A Turkey as resurgent as at any time since its Ottoman glory is projecting influence through a turbulent Iraq, from the boomtowns of the north to the oil fields near southernmost Basra, in a show of power that illustrates its growing heft across an Arab world long suspicious of it.

Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its prime minister, Mr. Erdogan, a hero to the Arab world, and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two most pressing issues in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

European Union Membership

For decades, Turkey has been told it was not ready to join the European Union — that it was too backward economically to qualify for membership in the now 27-nation club.  

But for many in aging and debt-weary Europe, Turkey’s economic renaissance poses a completely new question: who needs the other one more — Europe or Turkey?

It is an astonishing transformation for an economy that just 10 years ago had a budget deficit of 16 percent of gross domestic product and inflation of 72 percent. It is one that lies at the root of the rise to power of Mr. Erdogan, who has combined social conservatism with fiscally cautious economic policies to make his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., the most dominant political movement in Turkey since the early days of the republic.

So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone.

Background

Modern Turkey began in 1923, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a Turkish army commander-turned-statesman, whose radical secular revolution set the course for the rest of the 20th century.

Turkey’s rise as a regional power has been evolving for years, since the end of the cold war, when the world was a simple alignment of black and white and Turkey was a junior partner in the American camp.

Twenty years later, the map has been redrawn. Back in the early 1980s, a popular Prime Minister, Turgut Ozal, freed the Turkish economy, which had been static and largely centrally controlled. The shift created a manufacturing boom, and rural Turks flocked to cities for work. That major population shift, together with the growing wealth among the traditional, Muslim middle classes, strengthened democracy and reduced the forces for radicalism.

Now the struggle in Turkey is between politicians from that traditional, pious middle class, and the elite bureaucracy that has steered the state since its beginnings. Critics of the state say Turkey has outgrown the need for the military to intervene in politics. Its supporters say politicians cannot be trusted to keep Islam out of the running of the state.

The balance of power shifted with the rise of Mr. Erdogan, a tough-talking Istanbul mayor representing a rising underclass of religious Turks. Although he was despised by the secular establishment, his party, Justice and Development, won a national election in a landslide in 2007.