Turkey recently appointed 37 new ambassadors, and this lineup has some atypical players: Five of them are not career diplomats and two are headscarved women. The latter caught the public’s attention.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has altered Turkey’s longtime tradition of appointing career diplomats, enabling the government to nominate "outside" civilians without any sort of confirmation process.

The issue is not necessarily about the women's headscarves but rather about their family connections. The ambassador to Kuwait, Ayse Sayan Koytak, is the older sister of Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Kaya. Kaya’s younger sister, Sumeyye Sayan, made the news in April as an AKP member of the Istanbul City Municipality. Reports connected Sayan to firms that won multiple tenders from the municipality to provide “psychological support services” totaling a hefty yearly income of 2 million Turkish liras ($565,000). The opposition charged that this was unethical, as Sayan is a municipality official.

The second person who wears a headscarf is Merve Kavakci. In 1999, Kavakci was not allowed to take her elected seat in the Turkish parliament because of a secular ban on headscarves. She also lost her citizenship, as she had become a dual US-Turkish citizen without informing authorities. Kavakci regained her Turkish citizenship this year and is now the ambassador to Malaysia. Kavakci’s younger sister has been an AKP lawmaker since 2015.