Vultures home
It is no coincidence that the majority of detainees suspected of involvement in the recent spate of bombings in Istanbul are Kurdish, writes Gareth Jenkins from Istanbul
Syria last Sunday handed over 22 Turkish citizens suspected by the Turkish authorities of involvement in a string of deadly attacks in Istanbul in mid-November which left 61 dead, including four suicide bombers, and injured more than 750. Earlier in the week the Turkish authorities charged 20 people in Istanbul in connection with the blasts and named the four men believed to have driven the trucks used in the bombings. There was still no indication which organisation was responsible for orchestrating the attacks or whether, as is widely believed, Al-Qa'eda was involved.
The first attacks occurred on the morning of Saturday 15 November when two car bombs exploded within minutes of each other outside two Istanbul synagogues. Although the attacks were targeted at Turkey's tiny Jewish community, 19 of the 25 dead were Muslims. Five days later two almost simultaneous attacks occurred outside the premises of the UK Consulate General and the Istanbul headquarters of the UK-based HSBC bank. Among the 36 dead were Roger Short, the UK consul general, and two of his expatriate staff. Most of the victims, however, were Turkish Muslims unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of the explosions.
In the days that followed the second wave of bombings, the Turkish police launched a massive security operation in Istanbul and tried to impose a news blackout. But in leaks to the press, Turkish police stated that three of the suspects, including the drivers of the trucks used in the synagogue bombings, were from Bingol, a desperately poor predominantly Kurdish town in the mountains of southeastern Anatolia -- and the scene of some of the bitterest fighting in the still smouldering 20 year-old low-level civil war between the Turkish state and separatist Kurdish militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). On Saturday, the Turkish police announced that they had arrested Yusuf Polat, a native of Malatya, another Kurdish town a couple of hours by road from Bingol, whom they said had acted as a lookout for the synagogue bombings.
The Turkish authorities have yet to release full details of the 22 Turkish citizens extradited by Syria on Sunday, but most are believed to be female and six of them under the age of 18. The Turkish media has claimed that they had all been attending religious schools in Syria. Initial indications were that they and the majority of those arrested in Istanbul were originally of Kurdish origin.
After the second round of bombings in Istanbul, statements purportedly from Al- Qa'eda were sent to Arabic newspapers in London claiming responsibility for the blasts. Friends of Azad Ekinci, a Bingol native who is suspected of purchasing the trucks used in the attacks, said that they believed that he had travelled to Al- Qa'eda camps in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"Azad was always very quiet and very polite," said a former school friend. "But when he came back from Pakistan he had changed. He had a beard and was even more quiet and serious than before. We never knew what he was thinking. He was in another world."
Despite the recent flurry of arrests, there is still no indication that the Turkish authorities have arrested the ringleaders. Most of the charges filed against those detained are related to membership of -- or providing support for -- a terrorist organisation rather than actively planning or carrying out the Istanbul bombings. Nevertheless, regardless of whether the blasts were organised or inspired by Al-Qa'eda, there is little doubt that it is more than coincidence that most of those detained to date are of Kurdish origin.
In the 1980s, in an attempt to counter the appeal of the PKK, which was then officially a Marxist organisation, the Turkish state encouraged the spread of radical, purportedly Islamist, groups in the Kurdish provinces. The most notorious was the group which came to be known as the Turkish Hizbullah, whose founder Huseyin Velioglu was a native of Bingol. Hizbullah was allowed to take control not only of many of the mosques in the region but Qur'anic schools and courses which preached a violent version of Islam alien to the vast majority of believers. Elements within the Turkish security forces also cooperated with Hizbullah, providing its death squads with the names and locations of suspected PKK sympathisers. Hundreds, probably thousands, were murdered.
"All of the mosques here were controlled by Hizbullah," said Ridvan Kizgin, the chairman of the Bingol branch of the Human Rights Association. "The state knew exactly what was happening. Nobody was ever arrested for the assassinations of Kurdish nationalists."
By 1999 the PKK was in retreat. But Hizbullah, like some Frankenstein's monster, had grown out of control and had expanded out of the Kurdish southeast into the west of Turkey where it had begun to target moderate Islamist businessmen and politicians. In January 2000 Velioglu was killed in a police raid on a Hizbullah safe house in Istanbul. Further police operations resulted in the discovery of the bodies of over 60 of Hizbullah's victims in gardens and basements across Istanbul and the arrest of nearly 1,000 of the organisation's members. But many were soon released under the amnesties which Turkish governments periodically announce to curry political favour with the families of prisoners.
Although police operations had crippled Hizbullah as an organisation, not only were many of its former members free again but a new generation of militants who had been educated in the schools and courses controlled by Hizbullah were now coming of age. With no effective organisation in Turkey, many established links with foreign groups and travelled abroad for training.
"I don't know if the attacks in Istanbul were organised by groups outside the country," said Kizgin. "But if you want to understand why boys from Bingol have been named as suspects, you shouldn't be looking at recent history or Bingol itself, but at Turkish state policy in this region 10-15 years ago."
