Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2004, pages 36-37

Talking Turkey

 

Are Istanbul Bombings of Jewish, UK Targets Also “Al-Qaeda’s Answer to Turkey”?

	Relatives of one of the Jewish victims of the Nov. 15 al-Qaeda bombing of an Istanbul synagogue carry a coffin draped with a Turkish flag during the Nov. 18 funeral procession (photo credit AFp photo/Mustafa Ozer).

 

By John Gorvett

“MANY PEOPLE made the mistake of thinking, ‘now they’ve hit us, they won’t do it again,’” says Rusen Cakir, a leading expert on Turkey’s Islamist groups. “Perhaps we’ll know now not to make that error again.”

With four massive bomb blasts echoing each other across a few short days in late November, Istanbul rapidly became a city of sadness, anger and bewilderment this winter. Five days after 25 were killed and 300 wounded by car bombs outside the city’s Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues, 30 more were killed and 450 injured by suicide car bombs outside the British consulate and the Turkey headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank. At the time of this writing, it was feared more bodies might still be lying in the rubble.

Many Turks were frankly stunned by the attacks, with belief widespread that they must have been perpetrated by foreigners, outsiders with no connection or understanding of the country in which they had committed these appalling crimes.

At first there seemed much intuitively to support this idea. The Turkish Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the synagogue attacks, the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders-Front (IBDA-C), was widely regarded as a spent, rather amateurish force, and its claim therefore was widely disbelieved.

“IBDA-C doesn’t have the means to commit an attack like this,” said Nilufer Narli, dean of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University and an expert on the country’s Islamist groups. “Their leader is in jail, along with their leadership, and they have lost most of their influence over the last two years.”

Nor was that influence ever particularly great. They had attacked the Neve Shalom synagogue once before, but by throwing two hand grenades at it—a far cry from the camionette packed with C-4 explosive that took out both sides of the street on Nov. 15. Their other claim to terrorist notoriety was a botched assassination attempt against one of Istanbul’s leading brothel madams, in which IBDA-C’s militants succeeded only in killing one of her bodyguards.

Similarly, the choice of the synagogues seemed to indicate outsiders, as the city’s small Jewish population has long lived in general harmony with the Muslim majority. The Jews of Istanbul are largely descendants of the Iberian Jews given refuge here by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who helped them escape the anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by “Los Reyes Catolicos”—the Spanish Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand—in 1492. Living in the city for some five centuries, they are one of its oldest communities, and one of its most patriotic. The funerals of those Jews killed in the Nov. 15 blasts were characterized by the large Turkish flags draped over the coffins.

In the face of this uncertainty, though, politicians of various hues began exploiting the issue. First to promote a cause at the expense of the tragedy was Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who flew to Istanbul to implicitly lay claim to the Jewish dead as Israelis—an identity they themselves had steadfastly rejected all their lives.

Next, Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek used the occasion to lambast European Union countries for their support over the years of “terrorist groups”—by which he meant Kurdish separatists, even though no one had suggested any Kurdish responsibility for the attacks, given their clearly religious nature.

Given the massive international media presence in the city by this time, however, those accused Kurdish separatist groups also concluded that the event was a fine opportunity to publicize their cause, and occupied an Istanbul courthouse to demand the release of Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan. The occupation, and resultant storming of the courthouse by Turkish police, received exponentially greater coverage than the fairly regular occupations of public buildings undertaken by Kurdish groups in the past.

To some extent, this additional furor served to divert attention from the fact that, within a short time after the synagogue bombings, it had been determined that both the bombers had been Turkish. Unconfirmed newspaper reports also claimed that the Isuzu vans they had used to drive the explosives to the target had been purchased by other Turkish nationals, with a connection established to the southeastern city of Bingol. Meanwhile, a division of al-Qaeda, the Brigades of the Martyr Abu Hafz al-Masri, announced its responsibility for the attacks, along with its intention to attack targets associated with U.S. allies in Iraq—namely the UK, Australia, Japan and Italy.

At this point, the government acted to clamp down on press discussion of the issue, with the state security courts officially banning any naming of names. Bingol itself was then surrounded by the Turkish army, who refused reporters entry. Between 12 and 14 people were subsequently arrested in raids in the city.

Yet the morning after these raids, the bombers struck again, at the British consulate and the HSBC headquarters. British Consul Roger Short was among the dead, who were mostly Turkish and—as in the synagogue bombings—mostly Muslims, walking by in the street at the time, working in local shops or living in neighboring flats.

After this there seemed little doubt that the group responsible was an affiliate of al-Qaeda, despite further claims from the IBDA-C that it was responsible, though this time acting in coordination with the global group.

It seemed however, that behind the attacks was a group of a different caliber to anything Turkey previously had faced from the Islamist direction. Speculation mounted that the perpetrators included a number of Turkish militants who had fought in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan—professional, experienced killers who had long committed themselves to the cause of violence. The government claimed that it would do its utmost to quickly round up any such network, with a meeting of the National Security Council the day after the consulate and HSBC bombings declaring “special security measures” of an unspecified kind now to be in place.

Meanwhile, people waited for the next explosion. After suffering years of bombings, shootings, kidnappings and disappearances, Turks regrettably are accustomed to such atrocities, and within a short while, life had largely returned to normal in Istanbul, its streets full, its public areas crowded as the end-of-Ramadan holidays began.

Yet the key question remained. Was this to be a short series of spectacular attacks, or the beginning of a longer campaign of violence? Few seem to think the latter, as Turkey’s armed Islamist groups long have been a marginal force even within the country’s Islamist movement. But perhaps, in another sense, the attacks do represent a more long-term campaign: one against the kind of society Turkey has come to represent—within the Muslim world, yet pro-Western, determined to join Europe, yet still part of the Near East, generally secular, but also with a liberal, pro-Islamist government. Istanbul, no longer the country’s capital, but with a long tradition of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, was therefore perhaps the natural first target in a campaign also aimed at those values.

“On the one hand,” says Cakir, “the bombings happened because Turkey is a U.S. ally and also has relations with Israel. But mainly, I think, it is because of the progress Turkey has made toward becoming a secular, democratic, pro-Western and Muslim country. In many ways, Turkey is the answer to al-Qaeda—and these bombs are al-Qaeda’s answer to Turkey.”

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.

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