ANKARA, Turkey \u2014 Turkish authorities detained more than 100 people \u200btaking part in an anti-NATO protest march organized by the Communist Party of Turkey, or TKP, on Sunday, ahead of an alliance summit in Ankara next week, the party said \u200cin a statement.<\/p>\n
Turkey will host leaders from the 32 allied countries, as well as officials from NATO’s partners, in Ankara for a \u2060summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. Authorities have \u200bramped up security measures across the Turkish capital \u2060ahead of the meeting, banning demonstrations, barricading large parts of the city, and closing off roads.<\/p>\n
In \u200ca statement, the TKP \u200csaid it had organized the protest march in Ankara’s central Kizilay square, adding that \u2060more than 100 party members, including administrators, had been \u2060detained.<\/p>\n
Footage showed flag-waving protesters chanting slogans including “Murderer NATO, get out of country” and “No passage to NATO,” as riot police intervened using tear gas to disperse crowds.<\/p>\n
In a separate protest organized by the TKP, hundreds of people marched from Istanbul’s Taksim Square to Dolmabah\u00e7e. There were also two separate protests organized by leftist groups in the Kadikoy district. Despite a heavy police \u200cpresence, there were no scuffles during the protests in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
“We have \u200bgathered today in many parts of Turkey to protest against NATO,” TKP Secretary General Kemal Okuyan said in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
“We said that we would not hand over Ankara to supporters of NATO, that we would not allow Ankara to remain silent. We have fulfilled that promise,” Okuyan said.<\/p>\n
The government did not immediately comment on the protests or the detentions.<\/p>\n
Authorities last month arrested 103 people as part of anti-terror raids in Ankara, in which 225 people were detained.<\/p>\n
Separately, 39 others, including \u200bjournalists from independent outlets, activists and academics, were detained in anti-terror raids across the country, media reported on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Tuncer \u200cBakirhan, co-chair of \u200cTurkey’s pro-Kurdish \u2060DEM Party, and the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s court-appointed chairman, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, criticized the detentions as unacceptable measures hindering basic rights ahead of the NATO summit.<\/p>\n
“The country has been fully turned into a detention center by using the NATO summit as an excuse,” Bakirhan said on X. “We are living through days \u200cof undeclared martial law.”<\/p>\n
Turkish prosecutors \u200bhave previously said the operations were part of efforts \u200cto uncover militant group activities, \u2060without mentioning the \u200bsummit.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANKARA, Turkey \u2014 Turkish authorities detained more than 100 people \u200btaking part in an anti-NATO protest march organized…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2899,2898,3940,2900,383,1081,2678,66,54,50,2663,2902,2074,2901,2896,2903,2897],"class_list":["post-5985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-crime","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}