"Rise, fall and rise again of the Turkish Empire
A Turkey as resurgent as at any time since its Ottoman glory is projecting influence through a turbulent Iraq, from the boomtowns of the...
By ANTHONY SHADID
Ottoman Empire
Around 1300, the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey, began a 600-year rule that at its height included more than 2 million square miles taking Muslim culture to the doorstep of Christian Europe in the Balkans, south into modern day Yemen, and as far west as modern-day Algeria. The Western-leaning, highly developed social, economic and military institutions sustained it until declining after its defeat by the Habsburg army in Vienna in 1683. Its ill-fated alliance with Germany in World War I, led to its division by European colonial powers, with the resulting demographically problematic boundaries created mainly by the British and French generally seen as the source of much of the Middle East turmoil that followed.
ZAKHO, Iraq —
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."
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