Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist who wrote for the daily Hürriyet for 29 years until January 2017, when he was fired “for writing what was actually taking place in Turkey.” Today he is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum, regularly writes for the Gatestone Institute, and has covered Turkey for the U.S. weekly Defense News since 1997. He is also a founder of the Ankara-based think tank Sigma.
Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney and analyst based in New York. She has written extensively on geopolitics, security issues and US foreign policy for a variety of domestic and international think tanks, such as The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, D.C. and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Indonesian.