The bombings in Turkey

Once again, Turkey has been the target of bombers operating in the overspill both from purely internal conflicts with the Kurds in the southeast, and the civil war in Syria. Bombs on consecutive days saw 28 killed in a suicide attack in Ankara, 26 of them army personnel, and another six killed in a bombing on the road between Diyarbakir and Bingol in the southeast, on February 18. According to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the Ankara bombing is being attributed to the Kurdish YPG militia, which is based in Syria and is working in collaboration with the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Nine arrests have been made in connection with the Ankara bombing, none, nor is there any claim or attribution, regarding the bombing of the military convoy on February 18.

The conflicts that now envelop Turkey are extremely complex. The Turkish government is actively fighting the PKK and has been since 1994. It is hostile to but not necessarily actively fighting, the Syrian Kurds of the PYD, which is aligned to the PKK. It is friendly towards the Iraqi Kurds and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and its peshmerga forces. The PKK, PYD and KRG are all fighting the Islamic State (IS), as is the Turkish government which has in the recent past been targeted by the IS in a series of suicide attacks. All of these conflicts are interlocked and none of them is susceptible to an early resolution or a cessation of hostilities. Further adding to the complexity, the group attributed to the Ankara bombing, the YPG, is closely allied to the US, which is backing it militarily and logistically in its fight with the IS. The Turkish government regards virtually all Kurdish groupings with the exception of the KRG as terrorists and thus fair game for air strikes and other military actions — which put it at odds with the US and other interested parties such as the European Union. Add in the massive burden of Syrian refugees both in transit and camped in Turkey, and the future of this complex, multilayered conflict seem far from any resolution.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 19^th,  2016.

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