The suicide bombing of last Sunday not only killed 35 innocent souls in the middle of Turkey’s capital. It also highlighted the depth of the crisis that Turkey has been drawn into in the past three years – a crisis that is getting worse and worse, thanks to the vicious cycle between similarly zealous political actors.
The worst of these political actors is, of course, the PKK, the terrorist group unpretentiously called “the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.” Never mind that the organization that claimed the attack was TAK, the so-called “Kurdistan Freedom Hawks.” Everybody in Turkey knows that TAK is merely a side branch of the PKK, often doing the dirtier work of attacks on civilian targets. Also never mind that TAK claimed that their real target was the police officers in the middle of Ankara’s busiest square. At the very least, they must have calculated that many civilians would also die, but they didn’t give a damn. This horrific incident, along with the previous TAK car bomb in Ankara in February which killed close to 30 people, shows that Ankara’s worries about “the Kurds” are not unfounded.
[http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/terror-in-ankara-iron-hand-on-turkey.aspx?PageID=238&NID=96642&NewsCatID=411]