ANKARA, 23 November 2003 — In the wake of the worst bomb attacks in its history, Turkey is under pressure to act against militants but it faces an uphill task battling shadowy outlaws with international links, observers said yesterday. “The Turkish government of course wants to toughen up but it does not know who it is going to toughen up against,” Rusen Cakir, a newspaper columnist who is an expert on political Islam, told AFP.
Police believe that the suicide car bomb attacks that struck Jewish and British targets in Istanbul on Nov. 15 and 20, killing at least 52 people, were carried out by Turkish militants. But they suspect the bombings were masterminded from abroad, and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, along with a Turkish underground organization called the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front (IBDA-C), have claimed responsibility for the carnage.
“The real point is that we don’t know who masterminded these terrorist attacks. The terrorist foot-soldiers may be identified after the attack... But we cannot really know who is behind them,” the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper said.
Turkey is no stranger to Islamic extremism and bloody acts carried out in the name of Islam — a number of groups have been seeking to replace the secular state with an Islamic one since the 1970s — but a threat emanating from abroad is new.
US President George W. Bush described Turkey on Friday as a new front in the US-led “war on terror” launched after the Sept. 11 attacks and pledged to share valuable intelligence with Ankara.
Turkey, hailed by the West as a working Muslim democracy, is a close NATO ally of the United States which has been pro-Western for decades and aspires to join the European Union
Observers say the Istanbul attacks were designed to undermine Turkey’s role as a bridge between East and West and would test Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which is under scrutiny by the powerful army for its Islamist past.
Turkey needs to deal with the threat through effective intelligence gathering, not just tighter security measures, according to Arman Kuloglu, a retired general from the Eurasia Strategic Studies Institute, an Ankara-based think tank.
“Terrorism must be stopped right at its root... In any attack, the initiative is with the terrorist. Nobody knows where, how or when he will strike. That is where intelligence comes in,” said Kuloglu.
The car bomb attacks in Istanbul targeted two synagogues on Nov. 15 and the British consulate and HSBC bank five days later.
Foreign experts estimate they took at least two months to plan, which has sparked criticism of Turkey’s police and secret service, the MIT. “Why can’t the MIT find them?” asked the pro-government Yeni Safak daily.
“Security forces were on alert for a second string of bomb attacks even though they had no names or addresses and the car bombs caught Istanbul for the second time while it was on heightened alert,” the newspaper complained.
Earlier this week, Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party took power a year ago, acknowledged that lapses in intelligence could have led to the attacks. “But the power of terrorism comes from the fact that it has no known address. It is never known when, where and how it will strike,” he said.
Kuloglu also agreed that “slackness” on the Turkish side may have played a role in the bombings but argued that preventing attacks of this size required exchanges of intelligence at international level.
“These were international terrorist attacks and what was needed was an international and integrated system of intelligence,” he said. “At this point it is not possible to know what measures to take against what without good intelligence.”
Dogu Ergil, a professor of social sciences, said he did not expect a rift between the government and the establishment over the attacks but warned that the country needed to tread carefully in its struggle against Islamic militants.
“The government will introduce increased security measures and can suspend liberties and rights out of panic over security concerns,” Ergil said.
“This can slow down the process of integrating with the EU. Radical Islamist will benefit from any stalling in liberalization and democratization efforts.”
Istanbul’s police chief blamed “irresponsible” reporting by Turkey’s media for the second of two massive bomb attacks in the city over the past week, saying police had been just an hour away from catching the bombers.
“Irresponsible reporting in the name of a free press has unfortunately caused 27 citizens to fall as martyrs,” Celalettin Cerrah said at the funeral of two policemen killed in bomb blasts Thursday at British sites in the city.
But the head of the national press watchdog and journalists’ organization retorted that press had been starved of information about the probe and accused the government of blaming the messenger.
