Frontline Turkey ─ The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East

Turkey is on the front line of the war which is consuming Syria and the Middle East. Its role is complicated by the long-running conflict with the Kurds on the Syrian border – a war that has killed as many as 80,000 people over the last three decades.

In 2011 President Erdogan promised to make a deal with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), but the talks marked a descent into assassinations, suicide bombings and the killing of civilians on both sides. The Kurdish peace process finally collapsed in 2014 with the spillover of the Syrian civil war. With ISIS moving through northern Iraq, Turkey has declared war on Western allies such as the Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Unit) – the military who rescued the Yezidis and fought with US backing in Kobane.

Frontline Turkey shows how the Kurds' relationship with Turkey is at the very heart of the Middle Eastern crisis, and documents, through front-line reporting, how Erdogan's failure to bring peace is the key to understanding current events in Middle East.

Ezgi Basaran is a Turkish journalist who made her name covering the Kurdish conflict – reporting "on the ground" in the fight between ISIS, the YPG (People’s Protection Unit), the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish state. After accepting an offer to write a daily column on Turkish foreign affairs, she became the youngest ever editor of Radikal, the biggest centre-left news outlet in Turkey, and the first woman to hold the role. After facing government censorship when covering the breakdown of the Kurdish talks, she resigned and Radikal was shut down – an event which made headlines worldwide. She has written on Turkish domestic politics and her comments have appeared in major international media, including the BBC, the Financial Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.