Reports for congress: Erdogan World Leader, Gul moderating influence

Congressional Research Service refers to important assessments and claims in its report entitled "Turkey: Background and U.S. Relations". Prominent details from the report which was prepared by Jim Zanotti, a specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs at Congress, is as follows: Future debate over a new constitution and its implementation might include discussion of the potential merits and drawbacks of single-party rule and robust executive power. Do Turks prefer a system that is more subject to the personal direction of popular leaders, or one that might sacrifice some expediency of action in favor of greater consensus across party and ideological lines? This debate could be shaped by Turkey's economic outlook and its citizens' concerns about potential national security threats. Ethnic Kurds constitute 15%-20% of Turkey's population, and are concentrated in urban areas and the relatively impoverished southeastern region of the country. The government has adopted some measures allowing greater use of Kurdish languages in education, election campaigns, and the media. Most Muslims in Turkey are Sunni, but 10 million to 20 million are Alevis. Alevis have long been among the strongest supporters of Turkey's secular state, which they perceive as their protector from the Sunni majority. The Fethullah Gulen movement (or community) became a nationwide grassroots movement in the 1980s as part of the emergence of the new conservative Turkish middle class. In June 2011, security forces loyal to the Asad regime increasingly targeted alleged outposts of rebel sentiment and activity in northwest Syria near the Turkish border. As a result, over 20,000 refugees fled over the border into temporary camps maintained by Turkey. Over half of these returned to Syria, but additional refugee flows in late 2011 and early 2012 brought the number to approximately 9,200. Turkey could be a staging area for defectors and oppositionists to mount an armed campaign against the Asad regime, similar to the role eastern Libya played for the NATO-backed opposition forces that toppled the Qadhafi regime in 2011. Reports indicate that Asad might possibly be seeking to placate Syrian Kurds' opposition to his regime while simultaneously encouraging PKK terrorist activity in Turkey by granting Kurds greater autonomy in Syria's northeast. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was formed in 2001, he became deputy chairman and—briefly—its first prime minister after the successful election of 2002. When Erdogan took over the prime ministry in 2003, Gul became Turkey's foreign minister and helped accelerate Turkey's EU accession process. Many observers believe him to be a moderating influence on the Erdogan government. Erdogan became the founding chairman of the AKP in 2001. The AKP won a decisive electoral victory in 2002, securing the single-party rule that it has maintained since. After the election, a legal change allowed Erdogan to stand for parliament in a 2003 special election in Siirt, and after he won, Erdogan replaced Abdullah Gul as prime minister. In January 2009 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, following the Gaza Strip conflict between Israel and Hamas, he left the panel discussion in which he criticizing his fellow panelist Shimon Peres, president of Israel. His criticism of Israel and its actions has boosted his popularity at home and throughout the Muslim Middle East, where polls show that he may be the region's most popular world leader. Following the AKP's victory in 2002, Davutoglu was appointed chief foreign policy advisor to the prime minister. Upon his appointment as foreign minister in 2009, he quickly gained renown for articulating and applying his concepts of zero problems and strategic depth. He advocates for a preeminent role for Turkey in its surrounding region, but disputes the characterization of his policies by some observers as "neo-Ottomanism."