Yesterday a suicide bomb killed about 30 people, mostly university student volunteers for a leftist organization on their way to Kobani to help with reconstruction, in Suruç, the Turkish border town nearest to Kobani. Video taken as the explosion went off was playing on a loop and posted on the front pages of Turkish media across the political spectrum. This is the second large attack within Turkey connected to the Syrian civil war. There was a huge bombing in Reyhanlı in 2013 under extremely murky circumstances which the AKP blamed on the Assad regime, but such a claim would I think be outrageously implausible in the current case. PM Davutoğlu said on TV yesterday that it seemed to be an IS suicide bombing. Erdoğan's statement was more generic condemnation, but made him look like a bleeding heat lefty compared to the reaction of Nationalist Action Party leader Devlet Bahşeli, who took a break from insulting Chinese and Koreans for having "slitty eyes" (in retaliation for injustice against Uighurs of course) to make a speech rhetorically asking the murdered volunteers Is there nowhere left in Turkey that is in need, that you have to go off to Kobani? and redirecting the subject of terrorism to the effect of You know what else is tragic? Our soldiers being killed by the PKK.
Yesterday's attack was, it seems, retaliation for a Turkish crackdown on IS operations in the last couple weeks. There were police raids and sites like takvahaber.net, full of news about Kurdish and 'Safavid' Iraqi army defeats and archives of IS magazine issues and other propaganda, were finally blocked. The site's IP address, by the way, was found to originate at a foundation in Turkey founded by high-ranking AKP members. This fact is one of a number of pieces of evidence that the AKP government and MIT intelligence services have at the least be complacent toward and at worst actively supported the Islamic State with weapons and intel outlined here. Kurdish friends in Diyarbakir were insisting to me last year that this was the case. The intelligence sources, Kurdish fighters, and thinly-sourced newspaper articles should be treated with skepticism, but some of the videos that have leaked, particularly of Turkish trucks driving armored vehicles down a road with an IS flag waving above, are pretty damning.
At any rate whatever agreement, tacit or otherwise, might exist between Turkish and Islamic States, it may be breaking down now. If that breakdown continues, I expect things to get very bad. There are thousands of Syrians and Turks within Turkey who are connected to the Islamic State in various ways, and IS can utterly fuck Turkey's tourism sector, which has grown (in part because of problems in the Middle East and Greece) as much of its economy has recently stagnated, with a few suicide bombings and hostage massacres in Istanbul and Antalya.
Yesterday's attack was, it seems, retaliation for a Turkish crackdown on IS operations in the last couple weeks. There were police raids and sites like takvahaber.net, full of news about Kurdish and 'Safavid' Iraqi army defeats and archives of IS magazine issues and other propaganda, were finally blocked. The site's IP address, by the way, was found to originate at a foundation in Turkey founded by high-ranking AKP members. This fact is one of a number of pieces of evidence that the AKP government and MIT intelligence services have at the least be complacent toward and at worst actively supported the Islamic State with weapons and intel outlined here. Kurdish friends in Diyarbakir were insisting to me last year that this was the case. The intelligence sources, Kurdish fighters, and thinly-sourced newspaper articles should be treated with skepticism, but some of the videos that have leaked, particularly of Turkish trucks driving armored vehicles down a road with an IS flag waving above, are pretty damning.
At any rate whatever agreement, tacit or otherwise, might exist between Turkish and Islamic States, it may be breaking down now. If that breakdown continues, I expect things to get very bad. There are thousands of Syrians and Turks within Turkey who are connected to the Islamic State in various ways, and IS can utterly fuck Turkey's tourism sector, which has grown (in part because of problems in the Middle East and Greece) as much of its economy has recently stagnated, with a few suicide bombings and hostage massacres in Istanbul and Antalya.
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