Princess Royal hails Turkish friends and presses importance of remembrance
The Princess Royal has hailed Turkish friends and emphasised the importance of passing on the tradition of remembering those who have fallen in war.
Anne was speaking at a service to mark the 110th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign at Turkey's Canakkale Martyrs' Memorial.
She made her address on the peninsula where soldiers from the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, France and Turkey died in the 1915 clash.
The Princess Royal later delivered a message from the King, who attended services for the 90th and 100th anniversaries, and extended his 'special thoughts and prayers', and described solace for the 'dreadful losses' in the 'warm friendships and deep alliances that have emerged from the desperation of Gallipoli'.
A wreath was laid for Anne at the memorial, and she went on to lay the traditional red carnations at the graves of the Turkish soldiers.
She said it was a 'great and solemn honour' to attend the service, remembering the sacrifice on all sides of the 'unforgiving campaign'.
The Princess Royal went on to reference a quote by Turkish hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, saying: 'There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours.
'You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this island, they have become our sons as well.'
Anne described words such as these as having 'paved the way for ferocious battles that took place on this land to be replaced by long-lasting friendships and strong alliances that we must take forward to the future'.
She added: 'I pay a heartfelt tribute to all the nations represented here today.
'On behalf of the former Entente Powers, I salute the memory of Gallipoli and our future together.'
Anne also attended a commemoration at the French National Cemetery in Gallipoli before visiting the grave of a British war hero.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie was decorated with a Victoria Cross for his service during the Gallipoli campaign.
She went on to attend the Commemoration of the UK, Commonwealth and Ireland.
More than 100,000 troops died in an ill-fated campaign during the First World War by the UK and allies to capture the Dardanelles Strait in what is now north-west Turkey.
The assault in 1915 was intended to wound the then Ottoman Empire and cut off a key connecting water route between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea, a move which would have also aided Russia.
On Friday, Anne is expected to attend a dawn service to mark the 110th anniversary of the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the beaches of Gallipoli.
April 25 is known as Anzac Day and is marked across the two southern hemisphere countries.
Many from Australia and New Zealand have also travelled to Turkey for the anniversary.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hegseth says Nato allies ‘very close' to raising defence spending target to 5%
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said Nato allies were 'very close, almost near consensus' to an agreement to significantly raise targets for defence spending to 5% of GDP in the next decade. The Trump administration official indicated he expected the increased target to be agreed at a summit in The Hague later this month – and confirmed that the headline figure was to be split into two parts. 'This alliance, in a matter of weeks, will be committing to 5%: 3.5% in hard military and 1.5% in infrastructure and defence-related activities. That combination constitutes a real commitment,' he said. Hegseth was speaking at a press conference at Nato headquarters in Brussels after the morning session of an all-day meeting of defence ministers from the 32-country transatlantic military alliance. 'I'm very encouraged by what we heard in there,' Hegseth told reporters. 'Countries in there are well exceeding 2% and we think very close, almost near consensus, on a 5% commitment to Nato.' Nato's current target level for military spending, agreed at a summit in Cardiff in 2014, is 2% of GDP, but Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that European allies and Canada do not spend enough compared with the US. In an attempt to avoid Trump wrecking the first Nato summit of his second term, the alliance's new secretary general, Mark Rutte, proposed a 3.5% plus 1.5% target, though there is some ambiguity about the target date. Initial reports suggested that Rutte wanted allies to hit the target from 2032, though earlier this week British sources suggested the date could be 2035. Sweden's defence minister said he would like to see the target hit by 2030. Only Poland currently exceeds the 3.5% target for hard military spending at 4.32%, according to Nato figures, while the US defence budget, the largest in the alliance, amounts to 3.4% of GDP, at $967bn (£711bn). The UK spends 2.33% of GDP on its military, but has pledged to increase that to 2.5% by 2027 and to 3% some time in the next parliament. Earlier this week the prime minister, Keir Starmer, declined to set a firm date for the UK achieving 3% as he unveiled a strategic defence review. Related: Why is defence such a hard sell? The same reason Starmer is struggling in the polls | Martin Kettle Rutte will visit London on Monday to meet Starmer before the summit. Downing Street said the prime minister and the secretary general would 'talk about how we ensure all allies step up their defence spending now in order to respond to the threats that we face now'. Germany's defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said Berlin would need up to 60,000 additional troops to meet new Nato targets for weapons and personnel. 'We are stepping up to our responsibility as Europe's largest economy,' the minister said on Thursday. Germany, which currently spends 2.12% of GDP on defence, had been singled out by Trump as a laggard in spending, though until Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Berlin had been reluctant to be a leader in European military spending, partly due to the memories of the militarism of the second world war.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Russia is at war with Britain and US is no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says
Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review. Fiona Hill, from County Durham, became the White House's chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump's first term and contributed to the British government's strategy. She made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian. 'We're in pretty big trouble,' Hill said, describing the UK's geopolitical situation as caught between 'the rock' of Vladimir Putin's Russia and 'the hard place' of Donald Trump's increasingly unpredictable US. Hill, 59, is perhaps the best known of the reviewers appointed by Labour, alongside Lord Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, and the retired general Sir Richard Barrons. She said she was happy to take on the role because it was 'such a major pivot point in global affairs'. She remains a dual national after living in the US for more than 30 years. 'Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn't fully anticipated,' Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming 'a dominant military power in all of Europe'. As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already 'menacing the UK in various different ways,' she said, citing 'the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they're putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.' The conclusion, Hill said, was that 'Russia is at war with us'. The foreign policy expert, a longtime Russia watcher, said she had first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea. 'We said Putin had declared war on the west,' she said. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill said events since had demonstrated 'he obviously had, and we haven't been paying attention to it'. The Russian leader, she argues, sees the fight in Ukraine as 'part of a proxy war with the United States; that's how he has persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to join in'. Putin believed that Ukraine had already been decoupled from the US relationship, Hill said, because 'Trump really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn't need any more enrichment'. When it came to defence, however, she said the UK could not rely on the military umbrella of the US as during the cold war and in the generation that followed, at least 'not in the way that we did before'. In her description, the UK 'is having to manage its number one ally', though the challenge is not to overreact because 'you don't want to have a rupture'. This way of thinking appears in the defence review published earlier this week, which says 'the UK's longstanding assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain' – a rare acknowledgment in a British government document of how far and how fast Trumpism is affecting foreign policy certainties. The review team reported to Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and the defence secretary, John Healey. Most of Hill's interaction were with Healey, however, and she said she had met the prime minister only once – describing him as 'pretty charming … in a proper and correct way' and as 'having read all the papers'. Hill was not drawn on whether she had advised Starmer or Healey on how to deal with Donald Trump, saying instead: 'The advice I would give is the same I would give in a public setting.' She said simply that the Trump White House 'is not an administration, it is a court' in which a transactional president is driven by his 'own desires and interests, and who listens often to the last person he talks to'. She added that unlike his close circle, Trump had 'a special affinity for the UK' based partly on his own family ties (his mother came from the Hebridean island of Lewis, emigrating to New York aged 18) and an admiration for the royal family, particularly the late queen. 'He talked endlessly about that,' she said. On the other hand, Hill is no fan of the populist right administration in the White House and worries it could come to Britain if 'the same culture wars' are allowed to develop with the encouragement of Republicans from the US. She noted that Reform UK had won a string of council elections last month, including in her native Durham, and that the party's leader, Nigel Farage, wanted to emulate some of the aggressive efforts to restructure government led by Elon Musk's 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) before his falling-out with Trump. 'When Nigel Farage says he wants to do a Doge against the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has,' she said. 'This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steelworks and coalmines.' Hill's argument is that in a time of profound uncertainty, Britain needs greater internal cohesion if it is to protect itself. 'We can't rely exclusively on anyone any more,' she said, arguing that Britain needed to have 'a different mindset' based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience. Some of that, Hill said, was about a greater recognition of the level of external threat and initiatives for greater integration, by teaching first aid in schools or encouraging more teenagers to join school cadet forces, a recommendation of the defence review. 'What you need to do is get people engaged in all kinds of different ways in support of their communities,' she said. Hill said she saw that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US had contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, 'have to be much more creative and engage people where they are at' as part of a 'national effort', she said. If this seems far away from a conventional view of defence, that's because it is, though Hill also argues that traditional conceptions of war are changing as technology evolves and with it what makes a potent force. 'People keep saying the British army has the smallest number of troops since the Napoleonic era. Why is the Napoleonic era relevant? Or that we have fewer ships than the time of Charles II. The metrics are all off here,' she said. 'The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet.' Her aim, therefore, is not just to be critical but to propose solutions. Hill recalled that a close family friend, on hearing that she had taken on the defence review, had told her: ''Don't tell us how shite we are, tell us what we can do, how we can fix things.' People understand that we have a problem and that the world has changed.'
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump Appoints 22-Year-Old Ex-Gardener and Grocery Store Assistant to Lead U.S. Terror Prevention
The inexperienced 22-year-old reportedly tasked by Donald Trump with tackling U.S. extremism was working as a neighborhood gardener just five years ago and in a grocery store as recently as August 2023, the Daily Beast can reveal. Thomas Fugate, who graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio just 12 months ago, is currently heading up the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the DHS, as first reported by ProPublica Tuesday. The center, also known as CP3, plays a vital role supporting nationwide efforts to combat terrorism and hate-fueled violence. But according to the youngster's LinkedIn page, Fugate has almost no experience in this field—and in 2020 was working as a self-employed 'Landscape Business Owner.' There isn't much else on his resumé to suggest Fugate has the requisite skills to weed out terrorists. Prior to his work as a gardener—while studying for a degree in politics and law—Fugate worked at an H-E-B supermarket in Austin, Texas, as a 'Cross Functional Team Member.' According to his LinkedIn, he would 'perform various activities around every department of the store, fulfilling key duties contributing to store operations.' Since leaving college, Fugate has had a meteoric rise in the political world, having served as an 'advance team member' on President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, according to his LinkedIn page. An avowed Republican, he also interned at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, and for Texas Representatives Terry Wilson and Steve Allison. Fugate was reportedly hired as a 'special assistant' in an immigration office at the DHS in February, according to ProPublica. He then took over CP3 after its previous director quit. Fugate did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast's request for comment. 'Tom Fugate has performed well in his current role as a Confidential Assistant in our Immigration & Border Security suboffice,' a senior DHS official told The Daily Beast. 'Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office (CP3). This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.' Fugate set up a political Instagram account last year, where his profile contains the motto, 'Men used to do great things. I believe they still can.' He has posted a number of photos from the campaign trail and his time in Washington, D.C. He also posted a video that showed him with a host of lesser lights in the Republican party, including the disgraced former congressman Madison Cawthorn, Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell, and MAGA personality Riley Gaines. He is also pictured with Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. An older account in the name of Trey Fugate on X suggests that he was a fan of LEGO and Star Wars. He used the social media account to call on Texas politicians 'to protect the international affairs budget!' and 'Help the global poor, save lives.' That was just two years before he launched his new MAGA personality with the thomas4texas Instagram account, saying: 'Legend has it that Thomas Fugate didn't start the fire 🔥, but that is always been burning since the world's been turning 🤔. Welcome all to my new account for public service, community involvement, and politics 🇺🇸. Recently things have got to the point where I felt like my main account has become too focused on politics, so I wanted to switch things up!' The plethora of selfies and portraits plastered across his social media accounts suggest that the wryly arched eyebrow Fugate chose for his LinkedIn profile—a photograph taken in front of the seal of the Department of Homeland Security—was very much a knowing choice from a young man who seems to think he is destined for the top.
