PKK Capitalizing On Violence In Turkey – OpEd

Terrorism, regrettably, is not an unfamiliar menace to Turkish people. For the past 40 years, Turks have experienced their own dreadful version of terror attacks.

And it consistently had one origin: The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK, and other communist organizations like The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (or, DHKP-C) that worked as contractors to PKK. After a cease-fire period with PKK that started officially in 2013 in a so-called ‘peace process,’ the number of these attacks went down.

The effects of the ongoing battles in Syria and Iraq, which shared a total border of 910 km with Turkey, were limited with couple of events. This relatively quiet period for Turkey was disrupted a couple of days ago, when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive in the midst of a large crowd in Suruc, a Turkish town along the Turkish-Syrian border. The attack targeted a group of young leftists.
Needless to say, the international media largely covered the attack. However, some of the comments and speculations made after the incident as well as the image created and the suspicious details that emerged, call for a comprehensive analysis.

One of the most important details was the fact that, only 15 minutes after the explosion took place at 11.30 a.m., some international media outlets announced it to the world as a ‘Daesh attack.’ Even though, such a large-scale attack was clearly a sensitive issue that required days long investigation and evidence collection, and before even the Turkish prime minister, governors or the security forces made any comments, the said sources interestingly reached a firm conclusion only after one-and-a-half minutes. Not surprisingly, PKK administrators, as well as the leaders of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is supported by PKK, wasted no time declaring this as a Daesh attack and started saying that Daesh posed a big threat to Turkey.

Shortly after the incident, new details began to emerge like how 27 mobile phones were actively used during the moment of the incident, and that the surveillance cameras in the area didn’t work and that this crowd, which went to a high-risk area like Suruc, surprisingly weren’t frisked by police after municipality’s approval. We have to remind at this point that Suruc Municipality is an HDP-affiliated one. The fact that right at the moment of the explosion 27 cell phone calls were made, the cameras didn’t work, shows that this was a highly professional attack. It will be expedient to add a small note here: HDP is a political party in Turkey. But the fact that it gets the support of PKK, and actually is pressured by PKK, makes these details noteworthy.

The suicide bomber was a female, which immediately shut down those speculations that Daesh was behind the attack, as Daesh does not use female suicide bombers in its attacks. However, PKK makes special effort to use female members in suicide bombing attacks for years and there is an important reason behind this: To encourage men in the terrorist group to be more active in the fight. Many PKK informants confirmed this point in their statements.

When people began to realize this detail, tone of the statements began to change. Some even said that “the assailant was probably a male in female’s clothing” and speculated over an ID card of a person that wasn’t known by anyone in the group.

On the other hand, HDP leaders declaring Daesh as “the biggest threat to Turkey” raised many questions. It is because there is and has been only one terrorist group that posed any threat to Turkey for the past 40 years and it was clearly PKK. Daesh, on the other hand, didn’t carry out a single attack by that day in Turkey.

More importantly, Daesh, which does everything in full view of the world, going out of its way to publicize and air its actions to use fear as leverage, clearly didn’t have any reservations about claiming responsibility for its actions. Yet, it didn’t claim responsibility for the attack. Such a covert operation clearly didn’t match the profile of Daesh attacks. To sum it all up: Daesh clearly carries out very bloody attacks in the Middle East that we would never condone.

However, it is also clear that the Suruc attack wasn’t carried out by Daesh. There might be those thinking: “Daesh uses violence everywhere else, so what does this change?” It changes a lot for Turkey. All details surrounding this incident show that this attack was actually carried out in a joint operation by PKK and the secret states of Turkey and of some Western countries that are seeking to reshape Turkey and particularly the region. One might think, “PKK got hurt as a result.”

No, PKK hasn’t gotten hurt as a result. What PKK did was getting some university students that lived in Western Turkey and that sympathized with PKK for ideological purposes, to go the region and targeting them. So the ones that got hurt as a result were only those 31 young people that were gruesomely murdered. Yet, somehow PKK managed to appear as the victim. The goal is legalizing PKK in Turkey, whitewashing it to make it appear innocent and persecuted, and provoke Turkey into waging a war against Daesh. It is a known fact that US secret state in particular, needed cheap military force on land in its fight against Daesh in Syria, and after using Kurds for this, largely sought to deploy Turkish military for this purpose. And clearly some thought it would be a good idea to concoct a plan to realize all this.

Furthermore, this is clear proof that it is PKK that capitalizes on terror in Turkey as they used the attack as an excuse to wreak havoc on the streets of Turkey and cowardly martyred one Turkish soldier and three police officers. Two important points should be stressed at this point: One is the fact that Turkey will never launch a military campaign beyond its borders and will not allow its troops to be used as paid soldiers of the Western powers. The only possible intervention of Turkey in Syria could be for the purposes of safeguarding its borders and of peace and negotiation. The second is the fact that attempts to make people forget that PKK is the real threat to Turkey and efforts to legalize it, will fail completely.

Turkey is an experienced country that has battled with terrorism for the past 40 years and the secret agencies of the western countries better know this fact and abandon their goals of making subtle efforts to convince Turkish people to accept PKK.

This article appeared at Arab News.