Your article (Inside Islamic State’s oil empire: how captured oilfields fuel Isis insurgency, 19 November, theguardian.com) puts forward claims about Turkey that are mutually exclusive with the facts about the fight of Turkish security forces against smuggler groups that are in the Turkish headlines almost daily. In response to the advance of Daesh [Islamic State] towards towns along our Syrian border, additional army units were deployed to combat illegal border crossings as well as armed Syrian or Iraqi smuggler groups. Thanks to the efforts of the Turkish forces, 78m litres of oil was captured in 2013 before it could be smuggled. The figure is 62m litres for the first eight months of 2014. Members of the Turkish security forces lost their lives during the fight against smuggling.
Turkey has been vocal on establishing a comprehensive strategy against clearing the Daesh threat. Turkey and the UK have an outstanding level of cooperation against terrorism and we call on the international community to get together and start implementing this strategy to bring peace to the war-torn region.
Abdurrahman Bilgiç
Turkish ambassador in London
• The Turkish prime minister, Recep Erdoğan, is wrong to claim that the feminist movement rejects motherhood or that Islam defines the role of women as motherhood only (Report, 25 November). Feminism is about the empowerment of women and establishing and defending equal rights in society. The early history of Islam provides examples of the central role women played in agriculture, business and trade and war. Often characterised as a devout Muslim, Mr Erdogan shows a distinct lack of knowledge of the history of Islam which, at the time of its advent, provided radical ideas regarding the rights of women in Arab society in marriage, divorce, education and inheritance – centuries before other cultures adopted these ideas. This at a time when it was not uncommon in some tribes to kill daughters at birth. The teachings of early Islam aimed to instigate a revolution that its modern interpreters, in their quest for powerful, patriarchal structures, conveniently forget.
Mr Erdoğan uses tired and discredited millennia-old arguments, wrapped in faux reverence about the place of motherhood in Islam, to undermine the hard-fought and as yet incomplete struggle for equality for women in modern societies. He may do better to implement Turkey’s constitution, which provides equal rights to men and women.
Aamir Ahmed
London
