As ISIS Attacks Mount, Turkey Steps Up Its War on Free Speech
In the magazine
World
By Alev Scott On 7/6/16 at 11:10 AM
Sevgi Akarçeşme made sure she arrived at work early on the day her Istanbul office was swarmed by riot police. “[President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan had made it clear he was going after us,” says the former editor of Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper that had been highly critical of Turkey’s president and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). On March 3, someone who goes by the name “Fuat Avni,” an increasingly unreliable whistleblower active on social media, had declared that a raid was imminent on the Zaman newspaper, owned by Feza Publications, which also owns Today’s Zaman and the Cihan News Agency. This time, Avni was right.
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