MORE than half of the 54 killed were children. The attacker himself, according to Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was no older than 14. Turkey was already reeling from a brutal attempted coup and an ensuing government crackdown when, on late Saturday, a suicide-bomber melted into a crowd of guests at a wedding ceremony in a largely Kurdish neighbourhood in the southern city of Gaziantep and blew himself up. The Turkish government quickly pinned the blame on Islamic State (IS).
Turkey has endured a rash of IS attacks since 2015, including five this year. Of late, the group has been striking tourist spots and state facilities; its most recent attack, before Saturday, was a triple-suicide-bombing at Istanbul’s main airport. But overall, its main targets have been Kurdish. A laptop seized from the house of an IS operative who killed himself during a police raid in Gaziantep earlier this year revealed plans to attack a Kurdish wedding.
As IS loses territory to Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed militants in Syria, it has extended its war into Turkey. The jihadists’ aim, according to government officials and analysts, is to punish the country for its role in the American-led coalition against IS and to stoke violent tensions between Kurds and Turks.
They have partly succeeded. IS attacks against Kurds, which began last June, helped wreck a fragile ceasefire between Mr Erdogan’s government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), producing a wave of violence across Turkey’s southeast. Over the past year, thousands of people, including at least 300 civilians, have died in clashes between state forces and PKK insurgents. Pounded by tanks and artillery inside their urban strongholds, some of which now resemble areas of Syria, the militants have increasingly resorted to suicide- and car-bomb attacks. Last week alone, three such attacks against police targets killed at least 14 people, including civilians. For their part, many Kurds accuse Mr Erdogan of supporting IS against the PKK’s sister organisation in Syria, a charge he denies.
Turkish security officials see the uptick in PKK bombings, as well as the IS attack in Gaziantep, as part of the fallout from last month’s failed coup against Mr Erdogan’s government, in which some 270 people, mostly civilians, died. “If both of them have decided to hit us,” says one, “it has to do with the current state of affairs, because of the state of the country after the coup, because they think we are fragile.”
Turkey certainly seems more vulnerable than at any time in recent memory. Authorities and much of Turkish society are convinced that the Gulen community, a secretive Muslim sect, was the hidden hand behind the attempted coup on July 15th. The authorities have detained or suspended some 80,000 officials, including policemen and judges, as well as writers and journalists for alleged links to the movement. So big is the purge that the government announced last week that it would offer parole to 38,000 convicts to make room in prisons for suspected Gulenists. The army, the second-biggest in NATO, is in disarray. Nearly half of all generals have been dishonourably discharged, paving the way for a major reshuffle. A decree issued on July 31st placed the army, which had long enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the government, entirely under civilian control. Military schools have been shut down.
Other parts of the security apparatus seem to be in no better shape. According to Turkey’s interior minister, almost 6,500 of the 7,000 members of the police’s intelligence department have been linked to the Gulen movement.
Rather than treating IS terrorism as a separate problem, Mr Erdogan seems to be lumping the alleged coup leaders, dissident bureaucrats, Kurdish militants and jihadists into one big pile. On Sunday, he said there was “no difference” between the Gulenists, the PKK, and IS. The president has long suffered from a tendency to see every threat to his country, or to his own power, as part of a single plot to undermine Turkey. At a time when his country faces multiple distinct threats, that approach does not seem to be helping.