WThis military history of the Republic of Turkey covers almost a century from when the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, after the Turkish War of Independence. The Turkish Armed Forces has fought Kurdish rebellions in Turkish Kurdistan from the 1920s until the present day. Turkey joined NATO in 1952, during the Cold War. The military has taken power twice, in 1960 and 1980.
WThe 2012 Afyonkarahisar arsenal explosion occurred at 21:15 local time on 5 September 2012 in Afyonkarahisar, Turkey. According to Turkish Armed Forces, 25 servicemen died, four other soldiers and three civilians were injured by the accident.
WThe Battle of Alexandretta was the first clash between the forces of the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate in Syria. It was fought in early 971 near Alexandretta, while the main Fatimid army was besieging Antioch, which the Byzantines had captured two years previously. The Byzantines, led by one of Emperor John I Tzimiskes' household eunuchs, lured a 4,000-strong Fatimid detachment to attack their empty encampment and then attacked them from all sides, destroying the Fatimid force. The defeat at Alexandretta, coupled with the Qarmatian invasion of southern Syria, forced the Fatimids to lift the siege and secured Byzantine control of Antioch and northern Syria.
WCossack Constantinople raid of 1615 was a campaign of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, headed by Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny. The attack successfully penetrated the capital of the Ottoman Empire, entered its harbor, and burned ships before returning to their base. The success of this raid inspired the Tutora campaign of 1620 and the Khotyn campaign of 1621.
WCounter-Guerrilla is the Turkish branch of Operation Gladio, a clandestine stay-behind anti-communist initiative backed by the United States as an expression of the Truman Doctrine. The founding goal of the operation was to erect a stay-behind guerrilla force to undermine a possible Soviet occupation. The goal was soon expanded to subverting communism in Turkey.
WThe May 24, 1993 PKK ambush was a PKK ambush on Turkish soldiers that was carried out against unarmed Turkish military recruits on the Elazığ-Bingöl highway, executing 33 off-duty Turkish soldiers and 5 civilians, thus breaking the first ever Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) cease-fire with the Turkish government. Turkish authorities claimed that according to Abdullah Öcalan's testimony in 1999, it was carried out by a regional PKK commander..
WThe Refah tragedy was a maritime disaster that took place during World War II, in June 1941, when the cargo steamer Refah of neutral Turkey, carrying Turkish military personnel from Mersin in Turkey to Port Said, Egypt, was sunk in eastern Mediterranean waters by a torpedo fired from an unidentified submarine. Of the 200 passengers and crew aboard, only 32 survived.
WTurkish archery is a tradition of archery which became highly developed in the Ottoman Empire, although its origins date back to the Eurasian Steppe in the second millennium BC.
WThe Turkish Armed Forces and its ally the Syrian National Army have occupied areas of northern Syria since August 2016, during the Syrian Civil War. Though these areas nominally acknowledge a government affiliated with the Syrian opposition, they factually constitute a separate proto-state under the dual authority of decentralized native local councils and Turkish military administration.