Turkey: 12 soldiers killed after being exposed to methane gas during rescue mission
"On July 6, 2025, in the Operation Claw-Lock region, four more of our heroic comrades-in-arms who were affected by methane gas were martyred in a search and screening operation carried out in a cave used by members of the separatist terrorist organisation at 852 Altitude Hill, and the number of martyred personnel increased to 12," the Ministry stated on X.
It mentioned further that Turkey's Defence Minister Yaşar Guler went to the region with the TAF command level to conduct inspections and attend the farewell ceremonies of the soldiers who passed away in the incident.
The ministry said that the incident took place on Sunday, when the rescue mission started to find the soldier's remains who was killed during a military operation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Around 19 soldiers, who were exposed to the gas in the cave, were immediately rushed to the hospital for the required treatment, the ministry said.
Although the cave was cleared by Turkish soldiers, it was known to have been used in the form of a hospital by the PKK in the past, being at an altitude of 852 metres (2795 feet).
In May, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) had announced its decision to disband and disarm, ending the four-decade long conflict with Turkey.
The decision came after PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, in February urged the group to meet and formally decide to disband. The leader has been imprisoned on an island near Istanbul, Turkey, since 1999.
"The 12th PKK Congress has decided to dissolve the PKK's organisational structure and end its method of armed struggle. The process initiated by Leader Abdullah Ocalan's statement on February 27, and further shaped by his extensive work and multidimensional perspectives, culminated in the successful convening of our 12th Party Congress between May 5–7," read a statement from the group which was carried by pro-Kurdish news agency ANF.
"Despite ongoing clashes, aerial and ground attacks, continued siege of our regions, and the KDP embargo, our congress was held securely under challenging conditions. Due to security concerns, it was conducted simultaneously in two different locations. With the participation of 232 delegates in total, the PKK 12th Congress discussed Leadership, Martyrs, Veterans, the Organizational Structure of the PKK and Armed Struggle, and Democratic Society Building, culminating in historic decisions marking the beginning of a new era for our Freedom Movement," the statement further said, according to ANF.
The PKK, which is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, has been rebelling against the Turkish government for the last more than 30 years.
Turkish security forces frequently conduct cross-border operations in northern Iraq, targeting PKK hideouts and bases.
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Business Standard
10 minutes ago
- Business Standard
Trial starts over Trump admin crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists
Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration campaign of arresting and deporting faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations argued on Monday it was an orchestrated effort that has stifled free speech at universities around the country. The lawsuit, filed by several university associations against President Donald Trump and members of his administration, is one of the first to go to trial. Plaintiffs want US District Judge William Young to rule the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations. Not since the McCarthy era have immigrants been the target of such intense repression for lawful political speech, Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told the court. The policy creates a cloud of fear over university communities, and it is at war with the First Amendment. The First Amendment forecloses viewpoint discrimination; it forecloses retaliation; and it forecloses government threats meant to coerce silence. In response, lawyers for the government argued that no such policy exists and that the government is enforcing immigration laws legally and is doing so to protect national security. There is no policy to revoke visas on the basis of protected speech, Victoria Santora told the court. The evidence presented at this trial will show that plaintiffs are challenging nothing more than government enforcement of immigration laws. Since Trump took office, the US government has used its immigration enforcement powers to crack down on international students and scholars at several American universities. Trump and other officials have accused protesters and others of being pro-Hamas, referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Many protesters have said they were speaking out against Israel's actions in the war. Plaintiffs single out several activists by name, including Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was released last month after spending 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump 's clampdown on campus protests. The lawsuit also references Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was released in May from Louisiana immigration detention. She spent six weeks in detention after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb. She claims she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school's response to Israel's war in Gaza. The plaintiffs also accused the Trump administration of supplying names to universities whom they wanted to target and launching a social media surveillance program. They used Trump's own words in which he said after Khalil's arrest that his was the first arrest of many to come. The first witness in the case, Megan Hyska, a green card holder from Canada who is a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, detailed how the efforts to deport Khalil and Ozturk prompted her to significantly scale back her activism. Before Trump took office, she had supported student encampments at Northwestern, had taken part in scores of protests against police brutality and in support of Palestinians and had been active in the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. But after Khalil and Ozturk were detained, Hyska testified, she refrained from publishing an opinion piece critical of the Trump administration, chose not to take part in some anti-Trump protests and has decided against traveling back to Canada. It became apparent to me, after I became aware of a couple of high profile detentions of political activists, that my engaging in public political dissent would potentially endanger my immigration status, Hyska said. A government lawyer tried to undermine her testimony, confirming that she had not been contacted by anyone from the government asking her to stop her activism. The lawyer also referenced two letters Hyska had signed after the arrest of the activists to suggest she continued to be politically active prompting Hyska to say those letters were directed to Northwestern administrators, not the general public. The second witness, Nadje Al-Ali, a green card holder from Germany who is a professor at Brown University, also detailed how the immigration policy had a chilling effect on her work. Following the arrest of Khalil and Ozturk, Al-Ali said she canceled a planned research trip and a fellowship to Iraq and Lebanon over fears stamps from those two countries would raise red flags upon her return to the United States. She also dropped plans to write an article that was to be a feminist critique of Hamas and declined to take part in anti-Trump protests. I felt it was too risky, Al-Ali said of the Hamas article. I felt that would increase my visibility and profile and risk I would be associated with pro-Palestinian speech and be targeted. The trial continues Tuesday with Al-Ali on the stand. Several more witnesses are expected to testify tis week about the impact the immigration campaign has had on their activism.
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
What MNS-Shiv Sena protests don't see: The Hindi in Hindutva
After weeks of twists and turns, the Maharashtra government has suspended its proposed policy of introducing Hindi as a compulsory language from the first standard in state schools. This may appear to be merely a state-level issue. Opposition to it may seem like a seasonal bout of opportunistic politics. It is neither. The pro-Hindi policy of the state government has been in line with the BJP's longstanding ambition to have Hindi (shuddh Hindi, not Hindustani) as the national language — a policy that dovetails with its penchant for enforcing uniformity in every respect and implementing a one nation, one language policy. The recent troubles over education policy in Maharashtra, therefore, need to be understood in a larger context, beyond pedagogic wisdom, state-level party politics and Marathi pride. These troubles amplify the debate over what we mean by the Indian nation, and in turn, the deeper, routine practices of majoritarianism. When the Maharashtra government kept insisting on introducing Hindi in the first standard, only two responses against it seem to have mobilised public opinion in the state. One somewhat apolitical response has been about the wisdom of introducing three languages when a child begins her education. This argument is confined to the child's capacity to grasp multiple languages at an early age and the question of burden. The other response, predictably, was triggered by the pro-Marathi sentiment. This helped the estranged Thackeray cousins to share the same ideological ground after a long time. Sections of the media, and intellectuals who have always romanticised the idea that a strong pro-Marathi lobby would help the language, have naturally been excited over this second development concerning Marathi pride, so quick on the heels of Marathi being declared a classical language by the Narendra Modi government. But there is not much awareness of the larger ideological implications of the pro-Hindi policy. This is not restricted to Maharashtra alone. Many administrators and policymakers have always remained somewhat narrow in their approach to the language question — looking at it only in terms of convenience, and therefore, reducing it to the question of official language or link language. For many of us, diversity is always a clumsy inconvenience. The question of language, however, has always spilled over beyond administrative convenience to the realm of unity and nationhood. Thus, even within Congress, there always was a strong Hindi lobby that believed a common language was necessary for a nation and that Hindi could naturally claim that status. There were even some from the south in this lobby, and though they were not necessarily inclined to surrender their own linguistic traditions, they supported the idea of a national language — rashtrabhasha. That is why we had rashtrabhasha samitis pushing for Hindi education through voluntary efforts. This idea that Hindi would gradually evolve to become a national language often overlapped with the imagination that a nation requires one common language. Among north India's Hindi lobby, this overlap was more pronounced. But that overlap was not exclusive to Hindi-speaking pro-Hindi activists. Where does this craving for a national language come from? During much of the time when India's national struggle was shaping up in the early 20th century, the more prominent model of nationalism in Europe often privileged uniformity over anything else. This had a deep influence on many Indian social and political activists and thinkers. But the Hindutva nationalism of V D Savarkar and the RSS most enthusiastically adopted the idea of uniformity. Many in Congress were attracted to it, but believed that such uniformity was either culturally inherent in India's practices or that it would evolve over time through persuasion and practice. Thus, two different models of uniformity operated in actual politics as India became independent. The more predominant one was uniformity through mutual exchange, give-and-take, and historical sharing, while the Hindutva vision believed in the primacy and urgency of uniformity over anything else. This applied to the language question, too. Debates over Hindutva have often remained confined to the question of religion. But Hindutva as an ideology and politics should be understood not merely in terms of the Hindu-Muslim question. True, the practical politics of Hindutva obsessively revolves around, and is based on, deep Islamophobia, coupled with anti-minority sentiments and Hindu supremacy. But at the root of it is a more general imagination that democracy means a free play for the majority community. In the case of the language question, too, it would be a mistake to ignore this foundational belief that has shaped Hindutva. It is often argued that a certain percentage of people in India speak Hindi. It is another matter that this 'number' is derived historically through amalgamating speakers of many other languages and claiming those languages as variants of Hindi — that is exactly how 'majorities' are constructed, whether based on religion, language or culture. In the majoritarian project, some traits of one section of society are posited as common to most. It is then argued that all those who manifest those traits constitute one community, enjoying large numbers. More recently, the systematic push in favour of making Hindi the official language unofficially has been evident. While sometimes, the majoritarians hope for assimilation (samrasata), they don't have the political patience to wait for that to happen. Majoritarian projects, when out of power, speak of assimilation in order to save themselves from state action, but when in power, exercise the same state power to enforce uniformity. Since the BJP knows that its coalition partners have nowhere to go, it nudges them to support the idea of uniformity on the question of language. A large electoral majority in Maharashtra has encouraged the BJP-led government to adopt the policy of enforcing Hindi while its domesticated allies in Andhra Pradesh talk of willingly adopting Hindi. In withdrawing its controversial decision in Maharashtra, the BJP may have accepted a tactical retreat temporarily, but it knows that the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena neither comprehend nor want to counter the majoritarian project. With a soon-to-be-formed 'expert committee', the state government will subsequently find ways of continuing with a majoritarian politics of enforced uniformity. Just like in Maharashtra, the BJP's pro-Hindi policy will receive only limited opposition elsewhere, be it in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu. That response will be in terms of regional identity, language protectionism and an anti-Hindi stance. Recent history shows that Hindutva has the capacity to absorb such regionalist tendencies at state level. Thus, Maharashtra's protests against Hindi imposition will only produce a Marathi pride that is oblivious of the larger majoritarian project. That project will mostly go unchallenged as anti-Hindi politics will neither protect our linguistic diversity nor sensitise the public about the dangers of imposing uniformity. The day when votaries of regional languages appreciate the link between making one language 'national' and making one culture national, we shall have a better handle to understand the politics of nationalism masquerading as the politics of a national language. The writer, based in Pune, taught Political Science
New Indian Express
2 hours ago
- New Indian Express
Jose K Mani's man-wildlife conflict remark reignites UDF return debate
KOTTAYAM: Amid growing speculation on the Kerala Congress (M) re-joining the UDF, the party's recent call to convene an urgent assembly session to address issues surrounding the escalating man-animal conflicts in the state is being interpreted as a strategic manoeuvre to part ways with the LDF. KC(M) chairman Jose K Mani's statement has already kicked up discussions within political circles, suggesting that the party is actively exploring ways, and reasons, to exit the Left coalition. According to sources, Jose has already held informal discussions with the Congress high command regarding the switch in alliance. Reports have pointed to the KC(M) chairman holding talks with senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and general secretary in-charge of organisation K C Venugopal in New Delhi. At the same time, KC(M) leaders said there was nothing political about Jose meeting Rahul and Venugopal as they are colleagues in Parliament. 'There is nothing inappropriate about Jose speaking with Rahul Gandhi or Venugopal. As of now, it's too early for any such discussion regarding KC(M) switching to the UDF,' said a KC(M) leader. The Kerala Congress leadership is aware of the general pro-UDF sentiments among its cadre.
