China won Turkey's missile defense competition

LesAdieux said:

(Reuters) - Turkey has removed Murad Bayar, Defence Ministry undersecretary for the state-run defence industries, from his post with immediate effect, the official gazette showed on Thursday.

The ministry did not give a reason for the decision. Bayar had been influential in Turkey's negotiations with China over the procurement of a missile defence system.

Turkey's NATO allies voiced concern when it said in September it had chosen China's FD-2000 missile defence system over rival offers from the Franco/Italian Eurosam SAMP/T and U.S.-listed Raytheon Co. It said China had offered the most competitive terms and would allow co-production in Turkey.

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Turkey moves to block YouTube access after 'audio leak'

Turkey has moved to block access to YouTube, a day after a court ordered the suspension of a ban on Twitter, which PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed.

The telecoms authority (TIB) said it had taken an "administrative measure" against the site but another report suggests that talks are under way.

Some users found access blocked while others could still use the site.

Earlier, what appeared to be a leaked audio recording of Turkish officials discussing Syria appeared on YouTube.

It relates to a discussion of possible military operations in Syria, which was apparently attended by Turkey's intelligence chief, its foreign minister and the deputy head of the armed forces.

Reuters news agency, which examined the recording, said it could not verify its authenticity but it was potentially the most damaging purported leak so far as it appeared to have originated from the bugging of a highly confidential and sensitive conversation.

Mr Erdogan, who faces important local elections on Sunday, accuses social media of spreading misinformation and suggested earlier that bans could be applied to both YouTube and Facebook.

'Villainous' leak

In its statement, the TIB said: "After technical analysis and legal consideration.... an administrative measure has been taken for this website."

As conflicting reports emerged over the blockage, the search engine Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed that some users were unable to access YouTube in Turkey.

"There is no technical issue on our side and we're looking into the situation," a Google Inc spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.

The term #youtubeblockedinturkey has begun trending worldwide on Twitter.

At a rally in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir on Thursday, Mr Erdogan appeared to confirm the latest audio leak was genuine.

"They even leaked a national security meeting," he said. "This is villainous, this is dishonesty... Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?"

On Wednesday, a court in the capital, Ankara, ordered the TIB to lift its ban on Twitter, but it could be weeks before the order takes effect.

Twitter itself has filed a challenge to the access ban. It said it was concerned about a court order to suspend an account which had accused a former minister of corruption.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

Turkey has a second pipeline.

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for the past decade the Turkish state has been moving away form NATO, and becoming more and more a rouge. this reached it's peak with the Syrian Civil war. It's harder and harder to figure out what they are moving to, and the current affares in the middle east is moving beyond Powder keg.

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delft said:

Yesterday my Dutch newspaper opened with an article about the Turkish government blocking access to YouTube because it has available an item from a military-strategic discussion at the foreign ministry about a possible Turkish operation into Syria. It concerns a small Turkish enclave 25 km inside Syria that contains the tomb van Süleyman Shah, grandfather of Ataturk. That tomb might be destroyed by Al Qaeda forces operating in the area but one civil servant says he can send four man into Syria with eight rockets that they would fire at an empty piece of land to 'produce' international support. The Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu called the publication of this tape a declaration of war agaist the Turkish state. All this according to the article in my newspaper.

I just looked at the BBC site:

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Turkey seems to be losing its stability. A quarrel with Russia would attractive as pointing to trouble outside Turkey or disastrous when it results in economic hardship ( loss of Russian gas supply? )



This is really OT because it's lost its connection with air defense missiles but it's hardly reasonable to put it in the Syria thread.

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Chinese firm China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp. (CPMIEC) has made its first public statement on Turkey’s $3.4 billion long-range air and missile defense system, claiming that the finalization of the tender “is almost done.”

Wu Yang, the coordinator of the project, spoke at DIMDEX 2014 International Maritime Defence Exhibition in Doha, saying: “It’s almost done. We are also approaching the end in the evaluation of Turkey’s requests.”

In September 2013, NATO member Turkey chose CPMIEC, a firm that has been sanctioned by Washington, to co-produce the system, rejecting rival bids from Russian, United States, French and Italian firms.

With its provisional decision, Ankara approved the lowest offer despite worries about the Chinese system’s ultimate compatibility with NATO-owned early warning assets.

Following reactions from the West, Turkey had extended the deadline for missile system tender offers by three more months despite provisionally awarding the deal to China.

NATO and the United States have repeatedly conveyed to Ankara that a Chinese missile defense system will not be interoperable with NATO systems, even as Turkey has claimed that the proposed system will be compatible with existing systems.

CPMIEC placed the lowest bid of $3.44 billion for the tender, while offering the transfer of design technology and joint production.

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