Word: islamists
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...voting for a new President in the Turkish Parliament effectively forced the democratically elected government into early elections. That raised hopes of an imminent resolution to the crisis, which was sparked by secular opposition to the nomination for the presidency of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a politician with an Islamist background. The Turkish lira, for example, rebounded on the news after two days of sharp losses. But that vote will not necessarily resolve the standoff between Turkey's Justice and Development Party, or AKP as it is known by its Turkish initials, and Turkey's "secular establishment," including the military...
...important veto power. With Gul as President, and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) a comfortable majority in parliament, secular Turks fear "it would be the beginning of the end for Turkey as we know it," says commentator Metin Munir. Their concern is that the AKP harbors a secret Islamist agenda, and that without the appropriate checks on their power, they will seek to adopt Sharia-based laws...
...Since taking power in 2002, the AKP has tried to distance itself from some of the Islamist rhetoric of its precursor party, and in government, it has done more for Turkey's European Union membership bid than any party before it. But its record is patchy. It also tried to pass a law that would criminalize adultery, and to appoint an Islamic banker as head of the central bank. Every day the papers carry a report of an AKP official in some town doing something outlandish - men and women being segregated at a municipal event, a swimming pool banning women...
...military threat. Instead, Israeli ground troops found themselves bogged down in deadly urban combat with Hizballah guerilla whose tenacity and tactics the Israelis were unprepared for. That, together with the barrage of rockets into northern Israel that continued until the cease-fire went into effect, allowed the Islamist group to claim it had won a "Divine Victory" against the Jewish state, to the applause of the citizenry of most of the Arab world...
...arrest of 172 Islamist militants by Saudi security forces represents another blow to al-Qaeda, but it also sheds light on the group's determination to use its base inside war-torn Iraq to spread its jihadist campaign to Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world...