Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet.
—Ezek. 38:5
6949 Turkey’s Historic Conquests
Turkey began her conquest of Asia Minor in the fourteenth century A. D. Then in 1453 Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire at last fell at the Turkoman onslaught. In 1516–17, in the reign of Sultan Salim I, the Turkish army captured Palestine. Turkey’s seizure of the Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, earned for the Turkish Sultan the title of Caliph, head of the believers in the Islamic religion.
When Palestine fell to the British in World War I, Turkey longed for the day when this land would again be in her grasp.
6950 A Projection
Turkey has elected a leftist parliament for the first time in 25 years. She is predominantly Moslem, being a part of the ancient Persian Empire.
6951 U.S. Aid To Turkey
President Truman put through a Greek-Turkish aid program in 1947 that gave Ankara 100 million dollars in arms.
Over the years, that total has run up to more than 3 billion dollars in aid and 800 million is secondhand planes, ships and other equipment. Military sales to Turkey, between 1950 and the 1974 embargo, totaled 243 million.
6952 Turkey Takes Over U.S. Bases
The breach between the U.S. and Turkey was opened when the Turks invaded Cyprus, using American-supplied weapons to conquer much of the island, which has a largely Greek population.
This led to a 1974 move in Congress, against President Ford’s warnings, to impose an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Turkey—and to a declaration by Turkey on July 25 that U.S.-Turkish defense agreements were now invalid.
The Ankara Government ordered a halt to operations at 27 U.S. military installations—plus three in Cyprus. Some of the bases are so highly secret that their names and locations have not been disclosed.
The heart of U.S. military activity in Turkey is a network of radar and radio monitoring stations that watch and listen to Soviet planes, ships and military units in Soviet Armenia, the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. They also monitor Russian space shots and the testing of Soviet missiles.
See also: Russia.
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