generalspeaking

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Roosting Chickens

"We are face to face with a terrorism incident. We have the willpower to find and certainly punish those who are responsible."
"What's necessary will be done against whomever is responsible. This is an attack that targeted Turkey."
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu

"One of my friends protected me. First I thought, 'I am dying', but I was OK. I started to run after I saw the bodies."
"Our friends went there, and it didn't seem dangerous at that time. We couldn't even think something like that would happen."
Fatma Edemen, Federation of Socialist Youth Associations, Suruc, Turkey

"I, personally, and on behalf of my nation, condemn and curse those who perpetrated this savagery."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Mourners shouted slogans against ISIL and President Erdogan for his lack of action in tackling the armed group's rise [Getty]

Under President Erdogan's administration the open secret of Turkey permitting Islamic State fighters to infiltrate the country and casually cross the border from Turkey into Syria was a reality, that of a NATO-member country aiding and abetting a terrorist group to wreak havoc in neighbouring countries. Under the Erdogan administration, Turkey's military stood by at the border between Turkey and Syria while Islamic State attacked the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani.

There are Turks who deplore their Islamist government's actions, both at home and abroad. And they are the Turks whose politics Erdogan deplores in turn. So much so that he has turned the police and the military against those of his citizens who campaign against his government, who turn up at rallies to decry and protest their country's turn from a secular Muslim state to an Islamist state. From that demographic came a group of young Turks determined to do something practical for Syrian Kurds.

Kurds are cursed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration. Turkey's Kurds have long agitated for a homeland of their own, to be joined by Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian Kurds. Just as Turkey refuses to turn any of its geography over to a Kurdish homeland, he rants and agitates against Israel for having dispossessed Palestinian Arabs of land they claimed as their own, denying the legality of the presence of the State of Israel. Erdogan resists the goring of his own ox.

Now, the very jihadist Sunni terrorists that were given covert rein in Turkey, have demonstrated their lack of appreciation by attacking a Turkish group calling themselves the Federation of Socialist Youths. They had arranged for a news conference in Suruc close to Kobani, to discuss their plans to help rebuild the ISIL-destroyed Kobani, in an expression of solidarity with Syrian Kurds. The Turkish youth thought to build a kindergarten for the children of Kobani.

While the news conference was being recorded, a suicide bombing attack took place, killing 32 people present, and wounding one hundred. The political activists who are most certainly anti-Erdogan and his Justice & Development party were the target. The casual love affair that once existed between Turkey's government and Islamic State has since evaporated leaving in its place a Turkey that agreed to join the fight against ISIL.

Taking steps at a late date to arrest suspected ISIL members in Turkey and closing down their websites has its consequences. The carnage of the bomb blast of Monday as shocking an illustration as any of the blighted, and frightful dysfunction of Islamism in its psychotic seizures of past glories brought into the present; if conquest could be achieved by the sword in the 7th Century, why not its successful emulation in the 21st?