Istanbul attack

As a major hub for international flights, Turkey’s Ataturk Airport in Istanbul is an inviting target for militants trying to cause as much death and destruction as possible. The bomb-and-gun attack on the Ataturk Airport on Tuesday killed 41 people and injured more than 230, many of them foreigners. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim jumped the gun and immediately blamed the Islamic State for the attack but so far no one has accepted responsibility. It is unlikely that the Kurdish separatists were behind the attack since they tend to go after military and law enforcement targets rather than civilians. Since 2015, IS has been blamed or taken responsibility for attacks on opposition rally in Diyarbakir; the Kurdish town of Suruc; a leftist rally in Ankara; and two suicide bombings in Istanbul. Both IS and Kurdish rebel groups have targeted Turkey because they see President Erdogan’s intervention in the war in Syria as a way to destroy them. In the days ahead, Turkey is going to face a lot of questions about the lack of security at an obvious target like the biggest airport in the country. Early reports indicate that the suicide bombers detonated themselves before reaching the security check-post in the arrivals hall but questions remain about how they were able to get so close in the same place.

The worry for Turkey now is that the wider war in the region has spread within its border and there will be no way of containing it. Turkey has already had to bear the largest burden of refugees from Syria and Iraq and there is a danger that the Erdogan government will scapegoat them and claim there are militants hiding among them, much as Europe and the US have done as a pretext to turning away refugees. Apart from IS, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks, a radical and more violent offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party, has been behind a series of bombings in Turkey. Since the Kurds are among the most effective of those fighting both IS and Bashar-al-Assad in Syria, there are worries that fight will be disrupted by an angry Turkey. A ceasefire between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party also collapsed last year, leading to routine battles between the two in cities and town in the Kurdish south-west. Turkey is reliant on tourism to a large extent and the increasing violence will surely damage its economy and confidence in the unpopular Erdogan government. The country has now been fully engulfed in the violence that has afflicted the region and there seems no way out of the fire.