Jihadis are on the rampage in the name of Islam, the theatre of action in the main being the heartland of the proposed Islamic State to be formed by the eponymous terror group. While the war between the Iraqi forces to reclaim territory from the IS is still going on, with Fallujah regained a couple of days ago, elsewhere in the wide arc of terrorism murderous acts proceed apace.
On Tuesday, the Istanbul airport was attacked by three heavily-armed suicide bombers. More than 40 people were killed and several more injured. This was the deadliest attack in Turkey after the bombing of a peace rally in Ankara last October in which more than 100 people were killed. Wednesday’s attack on Turkey’s main airport is a further blow to the country’s tourism industry, a huge source of revenue. Three people wearing suicide vests barged into the heavily-guarded airport after neutralising the guards at the first of many check-points. They sprayed bullets at random in the arrival and departure areas before detonating explosives tied to their chests. Majority of those killed were Turks. Among the dead were people from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, China.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Islamic State for the attack and vowed to vanish it from Turkey. President Obama promised all help to Turkey in its fight against the IS. With Erdogan apologising to President Putin for bringing down a Russian plane on the Syria-Turkey border a few months ago, Putin too extended full cooperation against the IS. Another key player in the region, Israel, with whom Turkey patched up only a couple of weeks ago, pledged unity in the fight against terrorism. However, clarity was lacking in Erdogan’s own anti-terror policy. The tendency to compartmentalise IS terror in good and bad silos, in the expectation that some of it would further Turkey’s larger national interests, lay at the root of the problem.
Erdogan tended to often blame the Kurdish nationalists for acts of violence perpetrated by the IS. His refusal to reach an accord with the Kurds, a section of whom in sheer desperation has embraced militancy for realising their long-thwarted aspiration for autonomy within the Turkish State, has compounded Erdogan’s troubles. Besides, covert help to the IS in order to advance the sectarian Islam qua Islam wars which have besieged the wider Muslim world presently also undermine the anti-terror effort. While Erdogan seeks to eliminate IS from Turkey, he is widely believed to be instigating them in Syria against the Shia Government. The Sunni-majority Turkey under Erdoan also eggs on the IS to take on the Shia regime in Iraq.
The IS, on its part, sees Erdogan-led Turkey as an enemy, especially after it joined the greater alliance against jihadi terror featuring both Israel and the US as prominent supporters. In the complicated and confusing scenario in which inter- and intra-religious differences, a haphazard geography, personal animosities, ethnic grudges, etc., are all thrown together in the same cauldron, it is hard to be clear-cut when it comes to fighting jihadi terror. The resulting ambivalence is exploited by the terror groups to advance their own sectarian goals.
Erdogan’s hands would have been strengthened had he not used repression against the democratic Opposition and had sought its cooperation in finding an amicable solution to the long-standing Kurdish question. Where he erred was that instead of engaging the Kurdish leadership, who seek a separate, independent State, failing which an autonomous region within the Turkish borders, he encouraged IS to go after the Kurds. This was short-sighted. (We in India are familiar how it is hard to put back the genie of terror once it is released from the bottle.
Bhindranwale was egged on by Indira Gandhi to take on the Akali-BJP combine in Punjab but eventually he ended up turning against his own creators). The belief that there are good jihadis and bad jihadis, good IS and bad IS, has further aggravated the terror problem in the entire Islamic world. Terror cannot be good. Unless there is unanimity in the Muslim world that militias aligned with various Islamic sects can only inflict misery, whatever the religious and political goals they might claim to pursue, there can never be peace for their hapless citizens. The Istanbul attack, the latest in a series of such outrages in recent months, may not be the last unless Erdogan sheds his myopic approach towards terror and undertakes to eliminate it as an unadulterated scourge.
