NewsTracker Answers for week of Mar. 03, 2025

Q: Kurdish militants who have waged a 40-year insurgency in Turkey declared a ceasefire last week after their imprisoned leader told them to disarm. Where is Turkey?

Circle the area on this map

Q: The Kurds are a Southwest Asian ethnic group of 30 to 45 million people who have sought an independent nation for more than a century. They are a minority in Turkey and in which of its neighbors that recently underwent a revolution?

A. Armenia

B. Georgia

C. Iraq

D. Syria

D. In December, Syrian rebels overthrew the Assad family which had ruled the country as dictators for more than 50 years. The change of power in Syria is expected to diminish Kurdish influence in the country which often served as base for the militants fighting Turkish forces.

Q: Kurds have a separate language and do not comprise a majority in any nation. Kurdish is most closely related to the language of which country?

A. Iran

B. Iraq

C. Syria

D. Turkey

A. Kurdish is an Iranian language like the Persian spoken in Iran. There are a total of 86 Iranian languages spread across Western and Central Asia. Turkey has the largest Kurdish population followed by Iran, Iraq and Syria. Turkey once tried to ban the Kurdish language as well the words Kurd or Kurdistan.

Q: More than 40,000 people have been killed in decades of conflict between the Turkish government and the PKK group of Kurdish militants whose founder called for the ceasefire. He has been imprisoned since 1999 when he was captured in Nairobi, the capital of ...

A. Ethiopia

B. Kenya

C. Nigeria

D. South Africa

B. Turkish intelligence agents, with the help from the U.S., captured PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan inside a plane at an airport in Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 15, 1999. He has been held in a prison on an island in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul.

Q: Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city and straddles the Bosporus Strait, the boundary between Asia and Europe. The city was founded as Byzantium by Greek settlers around 660 BC, and it later was the capital of which empire?

A. Byzantine

B. Ottoman

C. Roman

D. All of the above

D. Emperor Constantine the Great rebuilt Byzantium and made it the Roman capital in 330. The city became known as Constantinople. The Roman Empire split in two after Constantine’s death, and the city became the capital of the Byzantine Empire in the east. That empire was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.