The wave of normalization promises to further improve regional strength

The recent death toll from the coronavirus across Europe is heartbreaking. The unpreparedness and insufficiency of health systems have shown us that the first world has invested more in financial systems, entertainment, stadiums, hotels and tourism than health care, as it is expensive and provides little returns. This pandemic has revealed this brutal reality at the expense of people’s lives. Sadly, there is little data to show if or how much the virus has spread in war-torn areas, such as Gaza, Syria or Yemen. The countries engaged in the Syrian civil war have no capacity to help the people living in camps amid very unhygienic conditions. We all know that the Syrian regime and its allies repeatedly targeted hospitals in opposition-held areas and, as the biggest-yet humanitarian tragedy of this century, the Syrian civil war could become a humanitarian disaster with the addition of the pandemic.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Doha on Nov. 25 to attend the fifth meeting of the Turkey-Qatar High Strategic Committee. President Erdoğan, accompanied by a large delegation, met with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to discuss regional issues as well as bilateral relations. There are several important implications of this one-day visit.

Kurdish mothers, who have been staging a sit-in protest that is above all political ideologies and stances, demand their sons back from the PKK no matter what

BBC covered the story as a "landmark visit to Armenia." CNN called it "football diplomacy." French President Nicolas Sarkozy applauded the visit as "courageous and historic."

Now with the World Cup frenzy in the world, and for the first time at this level in the U.S., Americans are one more time discovering the near-universality of soccer and also the feeling of fully participating in "a World Cup" along the other nations.