Sipping his coffee, 30-year-old Zilan1 looked at me and nonchalantly let drop that he was leaving for Raqqa tomorrow, as if it was the most natural thing to do.
‘Al-Raqqa?’ I asked. ‘Where ISIS is in control? Where they slaughter Kurds and journalists if they find any?’ He nodded, with a smile. It was the summer of 2016.
Zilan is a Kurdish journalist from south-eastern Turkey who works as an editor in one of the Kurdish news outlets. He does not remember his father, who died soon after being released from prison. He was ten years old when he first met a PKK guerrilla. In the 1990s it was routine practice for guerrillas to pay visits to communities for propaganda purposes. At that time, not supporting the PKK made people in the Kurdish region subject to neighbourhood pressure. The daughter of one of his relatives joined the PKK and was killed by a Turkish bombardment of the camp where they were training. The whole village went to collect her dead body, along with 13 others. Because Zilan was only 11, they hid him in the back of a truck, which actually saved his life. The village convoy was met by a Turkish military troop, whose soldiers opened fire at them.
‘My brother was saved because he was covered by the dead and wounded bodies that fell on him,’ he remembered:
They seized the young girls and asked them to bare their chests. They were trying to bring us down psychologically, too. Imagine: we went there to pick up 14 dead bodies and 13 more people got killed. Most of my relatives did not go back home that day; they joined the PKK. The very same day!
He and his peers were voracious readers during their teenage and adolescent years. They used to attend funerals during the day and come home to read books in the evening. They thought they needed to develop themselves politically in order to take on the state. ‘If the state wages war, we have to wage war too. Whatever the state knows, we have to know too.’ That was the dominant understanding.
Zilan used to deliver magazines and organize street protests in Diyarbakır. There was a saying going around then: ‘Who will stay in the city if everyone goes up to the mountains?’ They did not allow the weak and the disabled to go to the mountains anyway, and Zilan walked with a limp. ‘One is a guerrilla, another distributes magazines,’ Zilan said. ‘Another keeps the culture alive through folk dancing.’ Everyone felt they had a duty of some kind to fulfil. Even folklore was more than a hobby to them: it was their mission. Everything became a tool for resistance and an expression of patriotism.
One day when he was in his twenties, Zilan joined a demonstration to protest against the arrest of Öcalan. He was arrested and tortured continuously for eight days. His closest friend fell during a protest and was dragged along by a tank for three kilometres. His body was never returned home. His family applied to the European Court of Human Rights and received compensation for the violation of the right to live. ‘But we still don’t know where the corpse is,’ said Zilan. ‘Now, tell me what I am supposed to do with all these memories.’2 Once he was free, he fled abroad and never came back.
His story was typical of those of many Kurdish people who were children during the 1990s.
‘Why are you going to Raqqa?’ I asked Zilan.
‘Because I want to witness history changing,’ he replied.
I remembered I had heard that expression several times before from different Kurdish people. One of them was the co-chair of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş. ‘I can tell you that the ill fortune that the Kurds have suffered for a hundred years is turning around,’ he told me in August 2012 when the Syrian civil war broke out and Syrian Kurds began gaining autonomy in the northern part of the country.3 They called it the Rojava revolution, a Kurdish term meaning ‘Western Kurdistan’.
‘Kurds fight against ISIS, and they gain status in Syria; they add value for everyone. Rojava is a source of pride for all Kurds,’ explained Zilan. ‘The Middle East is a swamp, and Kurds bring not only other Kurds but also Turkmens, Arabs and Christians into the middle of this swamp and create a model that inspires hope.’
A new century was beginning: or at least that was what 30 million stateless Kurds thought. They believed that, with the chaos in Syria, they had a critical moment to regain control over Kurdistan, which had been divided into four parts after World War I. To achieve this goal, Kurds scattered throughout the Middle East needed to think beyond their immediate local issues. The power vacuum in Syria opened an opportunity for the formation of a track along which a Kurdish train could move with some momentum. The PKK, the HDP, the PYD, the KRG, Peshmerga, Barzani, Talabani, Öcalan – would all be the carriages of that Kurdish train. Although these carriages had expressed their differences about political direction over the decades, there was no way they could stop the train once it had started rolling. This time, they believed, the Kurdish train would keep moving and changing the course of history.
An autonomous Kurdish region in Syria does indeed represent a model for Turkey’s Kurds. Of course there are serious differences between the political environment in Turkey and in Syria. The power gap that allows the establishment of an autonomous region in Syria does not exist in Turkey. The PKK is aware of that but, for Kurds, Syria serves as a signal to them that they may achieve their goal if they are properly organized, however tough the circumstances are.
Sure enough, the developments in Syria had played a major role in the second year of the Kurdish peace process in Turkey. Many Kurds living on the Turkish side of the border had cousins, uncles and neighbours on the Syrian side fighting against ISIS.
The co-mayor of Mardin back then, Ahmet Türk, explained to me what that means:
Turkey’s Syrian policy is making things harder. And you cannot rationalize this policy by just saying, ‘We are against the PYD, not the Syrian Kurds.’ I will be very blunt here: if you continue to treat Syrian Kurds in this way, you will lose Turkey’s Kurds too. Kurdish people in the region are having a hard time tolerating this because they all have a family member in Syria. Many of the Kurdish tribes are split down the middle on the border, half in Turkey, half in Syria. People in Syria are suffering all kinds of cruelty and they want a safe autonomous region so that they can defend and protect themselves. This is not a threat to Turkey but an advantage.4
A ‘Western Kurdistan’ was gaining autonomy in July 2012. Turkey had three options. One was to sit at the table with the PKK, which had more influence over the Syrian Kurds than Iraqi Kurdistan’s Masoud Barzani. More than 10,000 people from Syria had joined the PKK over the years. Around 5,000 of the PKK’s guerrilla losses were Syrians. Öcalan stated many times that ‘they owe so much to the Syrian people for their huge support’. Moreover, the PKK had already spent 20 years training in Syrian camps. All in all, it is hard not to see the impact of the PKK on Syrian Kurds. Therefore, if a meaningful negotiation in Syria was to be entered into, involving the PKK was critical for Turkey.
The second option was to give Kurds in Turkey their rights, so that the 100-year-old Kurdish issue would be resolved before it became entangled with the Syrian war spillover. But Turkey did not play its cards like that and chose instead to pursue a third option, which was to find ways to prevent an autonomous Kurdish entity in Syria – a policy that had a negative impact on the peace process and caused a furore among the Syrian Kurds.
I first met Salih Müslim, the Syrian Kurd leader, co-chair of the People’s Democratic Union (PYD), in the spring of 2013. He comes from a family of peasants in a village called Seyran near Kobane. After receiving his education in Syria, he attended the prestigious Istanbul Technical University. He spent time in London and Saudi Arabia before establishing his engineering office in Aleppo.5 He became acquainted with the Kurdish movement and the PKK during his undergraduate years in Istanbul. But before that, like many Syrian Kurds in the PYD, he sympathized with Mustafa Barzani’s ideas. He calls himself a sympathizer of both Barzani and Öcalan, although he admits that after meeting Öcalan several times in Damascus, his affinity with the PKK deepened.6
Müslim was one of the founders of the PYD in September 2003. He defines his party as devoted to Syrian Kurds and rejects a direct affiliation to the PKK. On the other hand, it is no secret that the PYD is a part of the umbrella organization KCK and that the PKK has assisted the PYD in its war against the Assad regime and ISIS in terms of manpower and strategy.
Müslim was a regular in Ankara during the first two years of the Kurdish peace process. There have been elements of occasional, unspoken collaboration between Turkey and PYD forces, but nothing further. The Turkish government urged Müslim to fight under the Syrian opposition, give up any desire for autonomy and distance the PYD from the PKK, whereas Müslim asked the Turkish government not to obstruct aid reaching the Kurdish region in order to avoid undermining the fight against ISIS.
The meetings between Ankara and Müslim did not yield any meaningful solution, which was not surprising, since both parties played a blame game, even when there was a dialogue. According to Ankara, the PYD was working with Assad behind the scenes with a view to creating an autonomous region. Müslim and other PYD officials tolerated being portrayed as an extension of the PKK, but the accusation that they were siding with Assad enraged them.
‘The Turkish state fails to grasp the idea that Kurds will act according to their own free will when it comes to struggling for their rights,’ Müslim told me:
The Turkish regime got on well with the Assad regime from the 2000s onwards, right? We were still against Assad back then, and we still are, because he has always tormented us. And when Turkey had good relations with Assad, he turned out to be our executioner. They signed the Adana Agreement, for instance.7 Based on that, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad returned 200 PKK members to Turkey. We were tortured. I can give you a list of the names of Kurds who were killed then, with the exact dates of the killings. That is why it is out of the question for us to side with Assad. On the other hand, we did not play the role that Turkey asked us to play either.8
It is worth mentioning that the now bitter adversaries Erdoğan and Assad were once close friends. Erdoğan even used to call Assad ‘my brother’ and the two had gone on holiday together along with their families. Even though the animosity between the two countries went as far back as the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Turkey and Syria as separate countries, ties were mended during the initial years of the AKP era as part of then foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s ‘zero problems with neighbours’ policy. Erdoğan even lobbied for Assad’s international image and eventually helped Syria to break the international boycott. But by the beginning of 2011, Davutoğlu’s policy had almost completely tanked. So had the familial warmth between Erdoğan and Assad. Thus, PYD leader Salih Müslim was spot on. When it came to building discursive relationships with Bashar al-Assad, Erdoğan had the upper hand over the Syrian Kurds.
The PYD did not stand by the Assad regime, but neither did it join the opposing Free Syrian Army (FSA) when the war broke out, because ‘they had memories dating back to Ottoman times’. This created a third option for the Syrian Kurds, which was leading their own revolution. Kurds have never forgotten how they were left empty-handed after fighting with the Turks during World War I. This bitter memory, seared into their consciousness, precluded the PYD from adopting any stance dictated by Turkey. They were against the Baathists, but they would not become a part of Muslim Brotherhood ideology through the FSA either.
Salih Müslim was not a vindictive man. He often smiled while speaking in fluent Turkish and occasionally cracked jokes – dark ones of the kind that I’ve become familiar with during countless meetings with Kurdish people. But he resented Turkey’s Syrian policy so much that he spilled out a list of hurtful things Turkey had done before I could even shoot a question at him:
Since its inception, the Turkish state put barriers in the way of anything that would benefit the Kurds. It played a role in the disintegration of Kurdistan in 1929, in the execution of Kadi Muhammad [of Mahabad] in 1949 and in the culmination of the Barzani revolution in 1975. They bear a share of the responsibility for our inability to come to terms with the Syrian opposition. Look, it is we, the Kurds, who need democracy most. We asked the opposition to act together. The Syrian National Assembly and the National Coalition for the Syrian Opposition said ‘no’. Turkey is behind this attitude that the Syrian opposition has towards us. They provide all kinds of material and military support.9
However, Müslim also acknowledged that, since the peace process had commenced in Turkey, communication between Syrian Kurds and the Syrian opposition had improved. Nevertheless, the peace process with the PKK and Turkey’s Syrian policy were intricately intertwined; the well-being and coherence of one affected the other, moment by moment.
The PKK and Turkey’s Kurdish movement had invested politically and militarily in the Syrian cause, on the grounds of solidarity of kinship but also for other reasons: the PKK’s actions in Syria would function as a way of legitimizing the organization internationally; its base in Turkey had started to concern itself with Kurdish issues across the border and the PKK had to be a main actor in order to stay relevant; and investment in Syria had the potential to yield a long-yearned-for goal, an internationally acknowledged Kurdistan. Succeeding in these goals required perseverance and a meticulous global strategy.
The peace process afforded the PKK the chance to be a political force in the Middle East. With the eruption of the Syrian war, Turkey was no longer the only issue they considered to be most urgent. The theatre had just grown bigger.
‘Minutes before meeting you, I received information that there was a clash in Serêkaniyê [Ras al-Ayn] between the YPG [the Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) armed wing] and the Free Syrian Army,’ said PKK commander Murat Karayılan:
The situation is both tense and complicated. Forces have become entangled with each other – the YPG and the Free Army. But this is what has been accepted in Syria now: the Syrian government knows that if Kurds unite in opposition, then its job will become very difficult; for instance, they will lose Aleppo and Hasakah. Kurds are a third force there, independent of the state and the opposition. And this equilibrium must be protected for the sake of democracy.10
Even back in 2013, the PKK stood firmly against the Free Syrian Army because it believed that it was not seeking democracy but power, Karayılan explained. He continued,
Maybe not everybody here defines us as such, but we see ourselves as a movement for freedom and democracy. Our advance along this axis may, we think, open a new door in the region. Yes, your analyses are correct; the Kurdish issue in Turkey is only one of the issues we are interested in. We see the Middle East as a whole; it has been like this almost since the beginning of the movement. It has just come nearer to the surface now.11
Leading the PYD through its fight first against radical Islamist groups in Syria, then against ISIS, and underlining its secular, feminist and environmentalist rhetoric in interviews given to Western media helped the PKK build a new image. While the rise of ISIS has exposed the vulnerabilities of the Iraqi KRG’s Peshmerga forces, it has given the PKK the opportunity to shine in Iraq and Syria as a transnational player.12
The editorial board of the prestigious Bloomberg wrote, in an opinion piece, that ‘Kurdish fighters aren’t terrorists’ and
although the group is cultlike and stuck in a Marxist time warp, its members are also secular and largely pro-Western Sunni Muslims. Its combat troops, many of whom are women, were instrumental in saving Yazidi refugees from slaughter by Islamic State fighters. And the PKK’s cause is primarily national, not religious or ideological, so it can be negotiated with – given the right incentives.13
While the BBC had been publishing stories about how successful PYD–PKK was in Syria14 and, for that matter, that it was ‘as deserving of international support as is KRG’, Marie Claire, the women’s fashion and style magazine, hosted YPJ fighters’ stories in its glossy pages:
They are the YPJ […] or the Women’s Protection Unit, an all-women, all-volunteer Kurdish military faction in Syria that formed in 2012 to defend the Kurdish population against the deadly attacks led by Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate), and ISIS.15
News stories such as these that appeared in the Western media were misleading, as they embraced the PKK as if it had emerged yesterday solely to fight ISIS. When ISIS and other radical Islamist groups in Syria were put on one side of the scales and PKK and its Öcalan-inspired Syrian affiliate PYD on the other, the latter seemed like the lesser of two evils. But this should not obscure the fact that the PKK has instigated many violent attacks in Turkey over the last 40 years.
Although these news stories caused a stir in the AKP camp and among the columnists of pro-government newspapers, the government was looking the other way, because it was willing, to a certain extent, to help the peace process along. This implicit attitude persisted until semi-autonomous Kurdish cantons were formed in the Syrian town of Kobani and then in Afrin and Jazira. From that moment, both the AKP government and its media returned to their language demonizing the PKK and the PYD.
Immediately after the PYD had managed to wrest control of the Syrian town Til Abyad from the hands of ISIS, the pro-government media embarked on a propaganda campaign of equating the PYD with ISIS. Sabah, a mouthpiece of the AKP, had run headlines screaming that ‘PYD is more dangerous than ISIS’16 and ‘PYD’s chaos plan was prevented at the last minute’,17 and other pro-government dailies such as Akşam,18 Yeni Şafak19 and Star20 had all lined up in the same order. The vilification of the PYD seriously damaged the Kurdish peace process and the honeymoon enjoyed by the Turkish press and the PKK ended abruptly, even though the YPG – the PYD’s armed militia – continued to be portrayed as an ally in the fight against ISIS in the Western media and in Western politicians’ rhetoric.
According to the Kurdish movement, two significant events contributed to the collapse of the peace process in Turkey and the deepening of the crisis in Syria: the YPG’s operations to take first Kobane and then Til Abyad from ISIS. The Kurds’ argument runs that ISIS had gained control in Til Abyad with help from across the Turkish border. Til Abyad lies right in the middle of Rojava. Turkey aided ISIS in Til Abyad so that it could have control over Rojava and obstruct any Kurdish attempt to merge two Kurdish cantons, Kobane and Jazira. But it was not until ISIS besieged Kobane and Turkey prevented aid from reaching the canton that the Kurds of Turkey reacted fiercely to this Syrian policy.
In September 2014, ISIS mounted its offensive against Kobane, and by the end of the month it had surrounded YPG fighters. In the minds of the Kurds, Turkey’s fingerprints were all over this assault. On the third day of the Kobane offensive, ISIS released 46 Turkish people who had been taken hostage from Turkey’s Mosul consulate on 11 June 2014. The Kurds saw this as a sign of collaboration: Turkey had allowed ISIS to seize Kobane in return for the consulate hostages. KCK co-chair Cemil Bayık went so far as to claim that ‘a train on the Syrian–Turkish border had stopped in an Arab village close to Til Abyad and delivered boxes of ammunition four days prior to ISIS’s Kobane attack’.21
Kobane was a make-or-break point. If it failed, so would the peace process, as PKK officials asserted several times. They had not started the peace process ‘so that Turkey could move the war to Rojava by supporting the al-Nusra Front, Islamic State […] and al Qaeda affiliated groups’.22
The world was following developments in Kobane closely. It was an enticing story to watch unfold: a group of Kurds, who claimed to be secular environmentalists with socialist ideals, were resisting leaving their land to a bunch of barbaric jihadists. Many in the West had not heard of either the PYD or its armed militia, the YPG, but for them the Kobane incident epitomized a climax in the ‘clash of civilizations’. While daily reports coming from Kobane perceived the issue as the eternal battle between good and evil, between secular and Islamist, the Turkish government was not just indifferent but also failed to grasp the significance of Kobane for Turkey’s Kurds.
During the siege, it was one line uttered by President Erdoğan that caused a backlash among the Kurds. ‘Kobane is on the brink of falling,’23 he said. It was a seemingly simple statement, but his demeanour gave the impression that Erdoğan was happy about it.
On the same day, HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş and the KCK presidency called on Kurds everywhere to rise up in Kobane’s defence, which triggered a violent, two-day incident in the south-east of Turkey, mainly between two Kurdish groups. The PKK’s youth wing, YDG-H, clashed with sympathizers of Hüda Par (Free Cause Party), a politico-legal wing of Turkish Hizbullah, which had fought with the PKK in the 1990s. Many religious Kurds who, for example, wore Islamic clothes or long beards were targeted as if they belonged to ISIS, along with officers of Hüda Par. The death toll after 48 hours was 51.
These protests were a fierce manifestation of the Kurds’ emotional breakdown, the main cause of which was Turkey’s apathy towards ISIS’s merciless assault on the Kobane Kurds. Kurds, witnessing the aid sent to al-Nusra and the FSA but detecting no clear action against ISIS, were enraged that their brothers and sisters in Kobane had been abandoned to their own devices. They had been seething for some time about Syrian policy as a whole and the lack of any tangible step to help them during the peace process, and it was this sentiment that erupted into the protests.
The clashes between the two groups of Kurdish youths ended with a call from Öcalan. Shortly afterwards, the US airdropped ammunition to the YPG and stepped up air strikes. Acting under international pressure, Ankara allowed Barzani’s Peshmerga to enter Kobane via the Turkish border. Kobane was saved. But the same could not be said for the peace process in Turkey. The YPG’s conquest of Kobane meant a political defeat for Erdoğan, since now there would be a Kurdish hurdle to his ultimate plan to have a buffer zone on the Turkish–Syrian border. On the other hand, the main purpose of the buffer zone was in any case to prevent the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish enclave.
Therefore, the ever-changing map of Syria had become a challenge for the Turkish government. The first apparent shipment of arms to the YPG in Kobane also marked the beginning of a bumpy road in US–Turkey relations.
The events in Kobane indicated two other things. First, Ankara was neither empathetic towards nor aware of Turkish Kurds’ sentiments regarding Syria. Second, it did not have a comprehensive Kurdish policy spanning from home to Syria to Iraq. In the absence of a macro standpoint, Turkey thought that out-of-date micromanagement tactics would work and that it was possible to pursue a negotiation process with Turkey’s Kurds while sidelining or cornering Syrian Kurds.
Let us not forget that Turkey had tried and failed to thwart an autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq following the first Gulf War in 1991. This mistaken policy had caused many years of hostility in the region and also wasted huge amounts of time in terms of forming the political and economic alliances that have now developed between northern Iraq and Turkey. But the misreading of Syria would have a greater price tag than simply being a waste of time. The peace process was to be the first invaluable opportunity lost.
It was during this time that the HDP delegation met with Abdullah Öcalan for another round of talks in İmralı prison. MP Sırrı Süreyya Önder passed on a message from Erdoğan, which said that ‘he would come to an agreement with Apo. But there is only one red line, and that is Syria. He said he would not allow a Kurdish entity to be established like the one in northern Iraq.’ Öcalan stopped him short and replied, ‘You tell him that we will not allow Kurds to remain in a centralized Syria, and that is our red line.’24 With Rojava emerged a common Kurdish consciousness, which meant that developments in one part of Kurdistan would have serious ramifications for the others.25
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) had initiated the last peace process, not because it was a strikingly just and democratic party but because the developments in the Middle East had had a tremendous impact on internal politics, thus forcing its hands. But now it was the Middle East that was shaking the ground under the negotiation process. Why? Because of what many call a Kurdish phobia. The fear of a ‘Rojava’ in Syria that would give rise to another in south-east Turkey not only caused a hopeful peace process to stumble but also hindered the fight against ISIS.
If you put this question to someone from the Kurdish movement, you will most likely get a straight ‘yes’ for an answer. However, Turkey’s attitude towards ISIS is rather ambivalent.
Since the beginning of the Syrian war, there have been numerous reports that Turkey was sending not only food and medical supplies to the opposition groups but also weapons. In 2012, Robert Fisk became the first Western journalist to be granted access to Assad’s military prison in Damascus. He met a Turkish prisoner who said that he had come from Gaziantep, a city in south-eastern Turkey, to be a jihadist and a Salafi, and who claimed to have been radicalized in a Turkish refugee camp.26
When I talked to Fisk, he revealed to me something he had not written in his article in the Independent. The Syrian army had shown Fisk a cluster of weapons they found in Aleppo. According to Fisk, the weapons were made in Sweden and had found their way to Aleppo from Turkey.27
In the following years, other reports, usually in Kurdish and/or pro-Assad news outlets, claimed Turkey was supplying arms to Syria.
None of these claims in the media was enough to prove a direct link to an arms deal between Turkey and Syrian opposition groups or ISIS – that is, until four trucks full of ammunition were stopped by the Turkish gendarmerie, one in Hatay on 1 January 2014 and three in Adana in 19 January 2014. First reports from the scenes suggested that there were MIT officers in the truck and they had clashed with the gendarmerie, who had tried to confiscate the truck’s contents and arrest the officers. Hatay’s governor intervened and demanded the release of the officers, ‘since they were subject to Law Number 2937 [MIT law], under which the personnel have a special status and work in direct subordination to the prime minister’s office, [and] their undue detention would result in criminal consequences’. But the trucks were searched and videoed, despite the efforts of MIT officers to obstruct this.
When the news broke, the then interior minister, Efkan Ala, and prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan claimed that the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmen and accused the prosecutors who had ordered the search of being members of the Gülen movement and belonging to the parallel state structure.28
A broadcast ban was immediately imposed on the case. All relevant online content was deleted by a court order, and even commenting on the subject was prohibited. The prosecutors and gendarmerie officers who conducted the investigation were arrested on suspicion of espionage. However, despite all the attempts at a cover-up, the trucks’ search documents and testimonies of the gendarmerie included in the charges were leaked.
At the time of the incident, Turkey’s Syrian borders near Hatay and Adana were controlled by the jihadist Ahrar al-Sham group.29 There was therefore a possibility that the trucks were bound for them, but the gendarme who wrote the documents claimed that ‘the trucks were carrying weapons and supplies to the al-Qaeda terror organization’.30 The ammunition on the trucks was stacked in six metallic containers which had 25–30 missiles, 20–25 crates of mortar ammunition and Douchka anti-aircraft.31 According to the driver’s testimony, ‘he had twice carried the same shipment and delivered it to a field around 200 meters beyond a military outpost in Reyhanli, a stone’s throw from Syria.’32
The so-called ‘MIT trucks’ came to be a painful thorn in the side of the Turkish government’s image and policy vis-à-vis Syria and accordingly it swore to silence anyone who brought up the subject for further investigation.
Cumhuriyet, the oldest newspaper in Turkey, published the documents and the video footage of the MIT truck search in May 2015. An infuriated Erdoğan said that its editor-in-chief, Can Dündar, would not get away with this and would pay a heavy price. Shortly afterwards, two journalists, Dündar and Cumhuriyet’s Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül, were charged with revealing state secrets, espionage and aiding a terrorist organization, namely the Gülen movement, since the government believed that the interception of the trucks was masterminded by Fethullah Gülen operating through the prosecutors and the gendarmerie.
Although Cumhuriyet and Dündar have received several prestigious press awards for their reporting, they have been put through hell ever since the incident. After Dündar and Gül were arrested, they served several months’ imprisonment before being released on probation, acquitted of the charge of aiding a terrorist organization, but were then sentenced to five years for revealing state secrets, before surviving an assassination attempt in front of the courthouse. While he was awaiting trial on other charges, Dündar left Turkey in the summer of 2016. His wife’s passport was summarily confiscated while she was going to meet him.
After Russia became an active partner of the Assad regime in Syria and Turkey downed a Russian jet in November 2015, diplomatic relations between the two countries tumbled into crisis. Russia now claimed that Turkey was sending weapons to ISIS disguised as humanitarian aid.33 Russia also revealed drone footage of trucks moving between ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Turkey, allegedly smuggling oil.34 Turkey denied this accusation outright.
Sending military aid and supporting the Islamist opposition in Syria are one thing; tacitly condoning the presence of ISIS on the Turkey–Syria border is another. Turkey paid heavily for the latter.
Since the end of 2013, Turkey’s Syrian border had almost been a line in the sand that anyone could cross. This ‘open-border policy’ had created a great opportunity for ISIS recruits from Turkey and around the world to move freely. The influx of people trying to cross the border either from Turkey to Syria or vice versa even created ‘lively’ businesses. The Kilis Postası (Kilis Post), a local newspaper in Kilis Elbeyli, a town neighbouring the ISIS-controlled area over the border, gave its readers ‘happy news’ in November 2014:
It can be observed that there is an increase in the taxi ranks in Kilis, not only in the centre of the city but scattered all around. The number of taxis near the bus station has also risen tremendously. It should also be noted that these taxis are used for transport to the border. The overall impact of this development on our economy is positive.35
The impact was, however, not positive, since it was those taxis that many ISIS recruits had been using. Mahmut Gazi Tatar, who was captured and questioned by Kurdish YPG forces in Til Abyad, was an ISIS member from Istanbul. His route from Istanbul’s poverty-stricken Güngören district to Syria involved taxis in Kilis:
I took a bus to Antep, then to Kilis. My contact in ISIS had told me that taxi drivers in Kilis would help me to cross the border. So they did. A cab driver called a Syrian, who took me to a place where there were 17 others.36
A 29-year-old ISIS member, known as C. A., who was arrested while trying to cross the border from Syria to Kilis, was from Ankara. He had spent nine months in ISIS’s heartland, Raqqa. According to his account, he ‘took a bus from Ankara to Antep. At the Antep bus station, a taxi came and took [me] to the border. Another car was there waiting for [me] on the other side.’37
The open-border policy continued until Kurdish forces took control of Til Abyad in June 2015, which cut the main supply line of ISIS to its ‘capital’, Raqqa. Furious, ISIS started attacking Kurdish targets in Turkey. The Syrian PYD in Rojava had warned the Kurdish party, the HDP, that ‘an ISIS assault team of 100 had crossed the border in July and would target Kurdish officials’.38 As stated in the warning, HDP co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş would be the first target. Officials of the party brought up this issue in parliament in August 2015 and asked the government if they too had such intelligence. They received neither a response nor extra police protection. Unfortunately, the tip-off that came from Rojava was right.
Turkey suffered major ISIS attacks from the summer of 2015, most of which could have been prevented. Radikal newspaper, of which I was editor, followed the ISIS cells in Turkey closely. In September 2013, we published a series of interviews with parents in Adıyaman, a city in south-eastern Turkey, who lamented that their sons had gone to Syria to become jihadists. They had reported this to the authorities, but nothing had been done.39
A year later, the fight between the Kurds and ISIS in Syria spilled over into Turkey. At the end of May 2015, two bombs exploded simultaneously in HDP’s Mersin and Adana headquarters. Demirtaş was on his way to the building in Mersin when the bomb exploded. He escaped by minutes.
It did not end there. Another bomb hit the HDP’s rally in Diyarbakır and killed five people, a week before the June 2015 general elections. The bomber, Orhan Gönder, happened to be a young man from Adıyaman whose parents Radikal had interviewed.
In the newsroom, we pulled out our reports from back then and tried to construct a map of an ISIS cell in Adıyaman. At the heart of the Adıyaman cell lay a teahouse called Islam Çayevi. The Diyarbakır bomber Orhan was handpicked from there, his parents had told us. So a week later I wrote an article saying, ‘Young people from Adıyaman in eastern Turkey are crossing to Syria to become jihadist fighters. We have reported on them numerous times. We even know their names. Doesn’t the government know what we know?’
Despite the fact that Orhan Gönder was on a list of ‘missing persons linked to terror’, he had been able to plant a bomb at the HDP rally. He would not be the last ISIS recruit from Adıyaman to cause bloodshed. A month later, in July 2015, Turkey lost 34 young people in a suicide bombing in Suruç, a district near the Syrian border. The perpetrator was 20-year-old Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz from Adıyaman. He had been reported missing six months before, just like the other jihadists whose stories we had published. His mother did not know where he went; she assumed he was working with his brother in Gaziantep, also in south-eastern Turkey. Although the father was a truck driver and away from home for long periods of time, he was the one to realize something was up. He had gone to the police station and told officers, ‘My sons have gone to Syria to become jihadists.’ Just as Orhan Gönder’s parents had.
The Adıyaman police department had been handling the phenomenon of young people joining ISIS for two years. It looked into the incident and included Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz and his older brother Yunus Emre Alagöz on the list of ‘missing persons linked to terror’, based on the information provided by their father.
In other words, the perpetrator who staged the Suruç massacre was among the persons believed to be at risk of committing an act of terrorism, according to the police. And yet no one had been able to prevent him from committing this atrocity.
Following the Suruç attack, my column in Radikal ended with this paragraph:
Orhan Gönder, who committed the Diyarbakır attack, and Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz, who carried out the Suruç attack, were friends. Their friendship and their ties to ISIS developed at the Islam Çayevi [Islam Teahouse] in Adıyaman. The manager of the teahouse was Yunus Emre Alagöz, the older brother of Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz, the Suruç bomber. It is highly likely that he is in Syria or planning another attack. In other words, a new bomb attack may be closer than we expect. If Turkey’s intelligence agency cannot find its way despite so many road signs, then it should be considered responsible for all kinds of similar disasters that will happen to us from now on.40
Two and a half months later, on 10 October 2015, Turkey suffered its deadliest terror attack since the founding of the republic. Thousands had gathered for a peace rally at the heart of the capital, Ankara, when twin bombs exploded, killing 107 and injuring more than 500. One of the suicide bombers was a young man from Adıyaman: Yunus Emre Alagöz. The manager of the Islam Teahouse. The older brother of the Suruç bomber. The missing person whom I had mentioned in my column on 23 July 2015.
I have never felt so bad to be proven right.
Later, a police report published in Hürriyet revealed that the mastermind behind the massacres in Diyarbakır, Suruç and Ankara was a Turkish ISIS member called İlhami Balı, known as Abu Bekir, ISIS’s Turkey Amir. He was also managing the traffic of recruits on the Syria–Turkey border. Balı had been under Turkish police surveillance since 2002 and served three years on charges of being a member of al-Qaeda. When he was released, he went to Syria and joined al-Nusra and then in 2013 become an ISIS member. Interestingly, the trail went cold on Balı right after the Kobane incident in 2014, and it was during that time that he orchestrated the deadliest ever terrorist attacks on Turkish soil, mainly targeting Kurdish people.
These ISIS attacks not only cost precious lives but also jeopardized, if not practically ended, the Kurdish peace process. Since the Kurdish movement thought that the government was complicit in ISIS attacks on Kurdish targets in Turkey, the PKK retaliated. Following the Suruç massacre, two policemen were executed in their beds. Although the PKK leadership claimed that they had not ordered these assassinations, they did not deny the possibility of a link between the organization and the perpetrators. Turkey responded with an aerial campaign against PKK bases in Qandil, leading the insurgency in south-eastern Turkey to explode.
Just as those dreadful attacks by ISIS could have been averted, so could the collapse of a most optimistic peace process. Why had war rather than peace once again become Turkey’s fate?
Because of epic miscalculations and ghastly personal ambitions.
Because of an abominable political gamble that had been taken in January 2015.