"into the Middle East"??? "same reason as EK, QR"??

Neither EK nor QR have any significant growth carrying people "into the Middle East" their growth is due to connecting people East/West, or North/South, especially from secondary or terciary markets and undercutting the competition, not generally flying people only INTO their region, otherwise Gulf Air would be king in the region rather than an also ran.

TK has had huge growth based on 2 major reasons. 1) Almost a decade of economic growth in turkey which has spurred trade and investment. 2) The Turkish governments plan to make it a national champion. A lesser reason has been connecting traffic, as unlike places cited above Turkey has a population of over 70 million people, Istanbul alone somewhere between 15 and 20 million, depends who you ask, and as cited above much traffic between the US and Turkey is between the US and Turkey and not other places. As a matter of fact the only two significant places that I can think of that get a lot of connecting traffic from TK are Iran and Pakistan, and even at that you are talking about less than 100 seats per day.