[ISTANBUL] – Turkish officials vow to take the gloves off in the struggle against jihadists following the latest spillover of sectarian violence from Syria leaves more than 30 dead.
The death toll stands at 32 and more than 100 wounded in Monday afternoon’s apparent suicide bombing in Suruç, a mostly Kurdish border town in Turkey’s southeast, just a few miles away from the Syrian town of Kobani.
Though the Islamic State (ISIS) hasn’t claimed responsibility for the attack, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said there’s a “high probability” that the jihadist group is to blame. On Wednesday afternoon The Media Line learned that the Turkish government said DNA tests indicated that the body of the suicide bomber is 20-year-old student and Turkish citizen Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz, whom officials suspect of having connections to ISIS.”
Sinan Ülgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and former Turkish diplomat, told The Media Line that “there is every reason to believe” that ISIS carried out the attack, which he said was likely a response to Turkey’s recent domestic crackdown against the jihadists.
Over the past several weeks, security forces have taken scores of ISIS loyalists and sympathizers into custody and shut down several pro-ISIS websites, one of which threatened Turkey. Turkey has also tightened its borders and increased security cooperation with its Western allies.
But this attack wasn’t necessarily ordered by the Islamic State’s commanders.
Aaron Stein, a Resident Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said that since ISIS hasn’t claimed the attack, it could indicate that someone else carried it out, most likely operatives inspired by the group, the same phenomenon Western nations including the United States are calling “lone wolf attacks.” “I think the real risk for Turkey is not a direct order from ISIS, but ISIS sympathizers,” Stein told The Media Line.
ISIS itself may not want to encourage Turkey to be more vigilant in its policing of the border, since almost all of its foreign fighters and products travel to Syria across it. “Mosul’s super- markets are full, and they’re mostly full of Turkish goods,” Stein said. “[ISIS] has been careful not to poke Turkey, and Turkey has been careful not to poke them.”
Stein said the attack may not have necessarily been in response to Turkey’s recent crackdown against ISIS, but a spillover of the conflict between the jihadists and secular leftist Kurds in northern Syria. “I think it was more an attack on Kurds than on the Turkish state,” Stein said, pointing out that the recapturing of Kobani represented a major Kurdish victory over ISIS.
Suruç is just eight miles from Kobani and is full of refugees from the Syrian Kurdish town. The victims of the attack were members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF) on their way to Kobani to help with reconstruction.
Özgür Bedel, a 22-year-old student and SGDF member, knew all the victims well.
“Yes, we’re sad because we lost our comrades. It can’t be expressed with words,” Bedel said. “But our anger is more than our sadness at this point. We’ll use this anger to establish our new way of life.”
Kobani was overrun by ISIS last September, and nearly all its residents fled to Turkey. The Islamic State was later pushed out by the secular leftist Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Syrian affiliate of the outlawed militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with the backing of American air strikes. The town is part of one of the three cantons of the de facto autonomous Rojava (meaning western Kurdistan) region of Syria, governed by the PYD.
“For democracy to flourish in the Middle East, Rojava’s an open door. To open that door many people have paid the price,” Bedel said.
Many supporters of the Kurdish cause and opponents of ISIS took to the streets in several cities and towns in Turkey following the bombing to protest what they see as the failure of the government to keep its citizens safe, even accusing it of supporting the Islamic State. In many cases Turkish police attacked the demonstrators.
“Just as ISIS exploded a bomb in the midst of our friends, so did the police attack us with gas bombs, sound bombs and other instruments of the state,” Bedel said.
The PKK attacked Turkish soldiers near the Syrian border soon after the Suruç bombing, killing two.
Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), connected with the PKK, accused the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of complicity in the Suruç massacre and encouraged Kurds in Turkey to “take their own security measures.”
“We think the AKP and the Turkish state are responsible because their first priority is protecting the citizen’s safety and well-being,” Nazmi Gür, HDP vice co-chair in charge of foreign affairs, told The Media Line. “After the incident, the government undertook robust security measures, but all of these measures should have been taken beforehand. Instead they chose to take them after.”
Analyst Aaron Stein agreed that the government has made huge mistakes that it’s now paying for but said that claims that Ankara was supporting ISIS, widely voiced within the Kurdish movement, are unwarranted. “I’ve seen no evidence that the AKP supports ISIS. The evidence says that they had a horrendous border policy and that ISIS benefited from it.”
However, Stein says the government has supported other jihadists accused of human rights abuses and are engaged in battles with Kurdish groups in Syria. “There’s no doubt that the AKP supports Ahrar Al-Sham, which is virulently anti-Kurd, and that they’ve given support to Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is also virulently anti-Kurd,” he said. Jabhat Al-Nusra is widely regarded to be the main affiliate of Al-Qa’ida in Syria.
Scholar Sinan Ülgen says some of this state support for jihadist groups could have inadvertently benefited ISIS.
“The policy, from 2011 onwards of supporting some of the Islamist factions in Syria […] has allowed some of them to create their own support networks within Turkey, and over time some of them may have immigrated to ISIS […] taking with them their networks, their sub-structures and so on,” he said.
Ülgen says the bombing in Suruç will almost certainly change how the government deals with the threat from jihadists.
“[This attack] essentially undermines the whole foundation of the Turkish reaction to ISIS, which so far has been that Turkey would participate in the anti-ISIS coalition without being at the vanguard of the action, for fear of retaliation. But now retaliation has happened,” he said. “There will now be pressure building up for the Turkish government to do more and more visibly to retaliate against ISIS.”
Stein says the government needs more efficient legislation for dealing with returning jihadists. Suspects taken to detention centers enter a “nebulous legal grey-zone,” and are often released. Turkey also lacks a Countering Violent Extremism program which would help re-integrate fighters back into society.
As dozens of funerals are held for those slain by the bomber, HDP member Nazmi Gür says the atmosphere is tense.
“Right now in Suruc and [neighbouring city] Urfa there’s a [feeling of] nervous anticipation.”