This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. I welcome Sinan Chede, Senior Fellow at the Foundation

for the Defense of Democracy, to help me about Turkey, its ambitions and its strengths.

Not only in the conflict that is ongoing in the Middle East, I'm looking at the Hamas, the Hezbollah, the Houthis, but also to Syria, but also its election prospects, given that last time Sinan and I talked, it was about the jailing of the major candidate to challenge Mr. Erdogan in the upcoming presidential election,

the mayor of Istanbul Imamulu, who is now, according to the reports in the FT, forbidden from running for office.

But first, the guns.

Sinan, a very good evening to you.

There was a critical meeting in Azerbaijan, in capital of Azerbaijan,

Doha recently, between Israeli representatives and Turkish representatives. What was the agenda of the meeting and how did it turn out? Good evening to you.

Yeah, good evening, John. And thanks for having me. Yeah, so this has been a sort of impromptu meeting, which is probably very welcome,

mainly because there are no mechanisms between Israel and Turkey in terms of mitigating the potential of conflict

between the two sort of emerging foes in the region.

And what we mean by that is basically the Israelis have military sort of presence inside of

Syria and so do the Turks.

And Turkey is interested in expanding that military presence, whereas Israel is essentially

interested in essentially just sort of patrolling the status quo, both in the air,

plus on the ground to prevent sort of patrolling the status quo both in the air plus on the ground to prevent

sort of any potential Syrian threat reaching into Israel from its northern border.

And, you know, there are sort of worries on the Israeli side that Turkey's ambitions to sort

of expand its military presence, is going to result

in some unpredicted and unintended conflict. If you have Turkish and Israeli jets in the sky,

there are no sort of demarcated lines of who's supposed to fly where, who's supposed to stay in which

sort of area, et cetera, et cetera. And there have been increasing worries that this would essentially

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