This isn’t just Turkey’s war
What makes the country the most vulnerable to terrorist threats is its support for Syria’s refugees and the fight against Daesh that it has taken right to its doorstep
uring our last visit to Turkey in the autumn of 2013, we spent less than a week in Istanbul. But it felt like as if we had lived all our life in the ancient city that is hard to define until you have experienced it yourselves. Istanbul has that magnetic charm and warmth about it that makes total strangers fall in love and feel at home. Straddling the Bosphorus Straits, Istanbul or Constantinople does not just connect Asia and Europe and the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara, for centuries, it has celebrated the marriage of two great civilisations.
As academic Hamid Dabashi brilliantly argues, it is this all-embracing nature of Istanbul in particular and cosmopolitan urbanity and diversity of all modern cities in general that those who attacked the Regina nightclub in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve were looking to target.
Most of the revellers, who had gathered to welcome the New Year with their Turkish friends, had come from across the Middle East and from around the globe, coming from as far as India. Their carefree celebration of a ‘pagan festival’ — in the words of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) hatemongers — doing away with the notions of the East and West and civilisational conflict went against the limited worldview of the fanatics.
It is not just the fact that they were celebrating a ‘Christian New Year’ that made them potential targets of terrorists; with its unique blend of internationalism and tolerance, Istanbul (and Turkey itself, to a large extent) makes a perfect target for the extremist fringe.
This attack, as Dabashi puts it, is on the culture of tolerance, on the factual pluralism of Muslim countries that is represented in Istanbul. For the vast Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Caucasus in Europe to the Middle East and Africa and Central Asia and ruled from Istanbul, welcomed and sheltered the Jews when they were being hunted like animals in Europe and elsewhere, just as it hosted for long centuries thriving Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu communities, before it imploded during the First World War.
Indeed, in the words of Dabashi, Muslims have lived alongside the followers of other faiths in successive empires — from the Abbasids to the Seljuks to the Ottomans; the Safavids, and the Mughals. Up until its fateful encounter with European imperialism, Istanbul was the epicentre of a confident cosmopolitan culture.
But it is not just Turkey’s tolerance and welcoming nature that is under assault. The fact that it opened its borders to host more than three million Syrian refugees for the past five years and has actively and consistently taken the side of Syria’s oppressed people against the Baathist regime in Damascus — more than anyone else — makes it uniquely vulnerable. Its open borders have also been exploited by terrorists from around the world as well as the Kurdish insurgents and those loyal to the Syrian regime to target Turkey.
The New Year’s Eve carnage was one of nearly a dozen terror attacks that the country has suffered over the past year or so, with hundreds of casualties, not to mention the devastating effect it has had on its crucial tourism industry and vibrant economy. Turkey finds itself truly in the eye of the storm.
Friend-turned-foe
What is more, the country is increasingly isolated from its traditional western and Nato allies after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s veiled accusations that the failed military coup last July against him enjoyed the West’s blessings. He has alleged that his friend-turned-foe Fethullah Gulen, the preacher and leader of the Gulen movement, who is based in the United States for the past many years, enjoys the tacit support of Washington.
While it was only Erdogan’s sheer audacity and force of personality, coupled with the massive popular support that he has enjoyed over the past decade and more may have defeated the coup plotters, the subsequent nationwide crackdown on various arms of the state, including the army, judiciary and the media, hasn’t gone down well with the West.
Ankara has also accused the US of arming and supporting both the Kurdish militants as well as the Daesh terrorists in Syria and in Turkey’s border areas, a serious charge if it is true. There have also been broad hints that the US embassy in Ankara had the advance intelligence about the New Year’s Eve attack, which it chose not to share with the host.
The method in the madness is hard to miss in the series of attacks that Turkey has suffered over the past year or two.
This is a war Turkey cannot afford to lose. Yet, look at the callous indifference to the carnage in Istanbul. Veteran Middle East watcher Robert Fisk goes to the extent of terming the western media’s reaction as typically racist. However, those deriving vicarious pleasure out of Ankara’s woes mustn’t forget that it is fighting everyone’s war. If Turkey goes down, they wouldn’t win either.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter @AijazZakaSyed