Ankara bombing signals a new and grim era in Turkey

The car-bomb explosion in the heart of Ankara on 13 March was the second bomb attack in Turkey’s capital city in 25 days. This one killed 37 people. In all 169 people have now died in the three bomb explosions in the five months since October.

This is a horrific departure from the usual law-abiding and peaceful life of the Turkish capital in normal times, not least because the explosion took place at the busiest bus stop and metro station in the capital, a place everyone knows well.

It quickly became clear that the bombing was probably the work of Kurdish terrorists, though initially they were not the only possible suspects. Turkey is fighting a war against terrorism on two fronts and the Islamic State might also have been responsible. It probably carried out the first major bombing - the July bombing at Suruc close to the Syrian border in which 34 people died - and certainly undertook the first Ankara bombing on 10 October in which 102 died, and also the Sultanahmet bombing in Istanbu1 which killed 10 Germans.

This latest bombing however looks much more similar to the previous bombing in Ankara on 17 February which was claimed by TAK, the "Kurdistan Freedom Falcons", an ultra-violent group whose links with the PKK are hazy but which seems to operate as its urban terrorism offshoot in western Turkey.

Forensic evidence quickly emerged which seems to link the two bombings. Though the Turkish authorities slapped yet another news black-out on media reporting of the investigation into the latest bombing, other details swiftly emerged. The attack was the work of two people in a moving car, a man and a woman. The press quickly identified the woman as a student, Seher Cagla Demir, a student at Balikesir University who was facing criminal charges for her links with the PKK.

The PKK and Turkey have been fighting what amounts almost to a civil war since the breakdown of the two-year-old peace process last autumn when President Erdogan launched aerial bombing attacks on PKK positions inside Turkey and northern Iraq after the murder of two policemen. Since then hundreds of soldiers, policemen, civilians and PKK militants have died on an almost daily basis and harsh government cleansing of districts in south-eastern cities where the PKK was strongest have reduced many streets to rubble – though they have not stopped the flow of daily attacks and deaths.

This is the grim background to the latest Ankara bombing which took place on the day when new indefinite curfews (which often last for several weeks) were imposed by the Ministry of the Interior in districts of three southeast Anatolian towns. The towns - Nusaybin and Sırnak are braced for many days, if not weeks, of internecine fighting and perhaps even tank bombardment.

What is strikingly different about Sunday’s bombing is that it was an attack on unarmed civilians, something which IS has regularly carried out in its own bomb attacks but which the PKK till now has always deliberately avoided. Though the 17 February bombing in Ankara killed civilians, it was mainly an attack on military and police buses.

The reason for this escalation in tactics is that the middle ground in the Kurdish-Turkish dialogue has been destroyed by eight months of violent tactics.

The pro-Kurdish HDP, once a shining hope for those who believed in a non-violent settlement between the Turkish government and Kurdish groups, condemned the bombing rapidly and unequivocally. But it has been relegated to the political sidelines by the violence in the southeast since July.

The government is preparing to strip Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, the two HDP co-chairpersons, of their immunity and place them on trial for treason and terrorism, immediately the current debate is over. They will almost certainly disappear into prison when the legal process starts.

This weekend’s bombing is a foretaste of what might follow if PKK offshoots then go for a sustained urban terrorism campaign. One sign that the hardline leadership under Cemal Bayık may be planning exactly this came in the second half of last week when the PKK announced that it had formed a common front with nine hardline Turkish Marxist-Leninist revolutionary terrorist groups.

This is a complete new departure. In the past the Kurdish movement always took great pains to distinguish itself from the Turkish far left. One of the groups, the DHKP-C (Peoples Revolutionary Communist Party and Front), is not just the author of recurrent violent attacks on US diplomatic posts in Turkey but is also the direct rival of the PKK among Shia and Alevi groups in southeastern Turkey, the PKK following being predominantly Sunni. (Both groups of course espouse secular leftwing ideologies.)

The implication must be that the PKK is intending to cooperate operationally with these groups. It is doing so regardless of the fact that this will certainly kill moves among pro-Kurdish groups in the USA to press for it to be removed from the US government’s list of terrorist organisations.

In the past, successive Turkish governments have usually found it relatively easy to crush terrorist movements, though often by using drastic means and at a relatively high price in civil liberties. The difference this time is that there are at least 15 million ethnic Kurds in Turkey, as opposed to tiny groups of ultra-leftists, and millions of them live in the west of the country – so the task of eliminating terrorist cells will be more difficult while the risk of communal tensions and even conflict is high.

None of this seems to have daunted the authorities who spent much of Monday rounding up and detaining opponents from groups such as the Gulenists who cannot plausibly be claimed as allies of the PKK. There were 56 of those, compared to 20 reported arrested because of the bombing. There were also attempts to suggest that the presumed female bomber had links with Cumhuriyet newspaper, the government’s main left of centre bugbear.  

The rule of the day in Turkey is ever more polarisation and bitterness. A leading AKP figure and the head of the Constitutional Court have both warned that Turks "must learn to live with terror". The bloodshed and violence of the conflict in Syria seems to have travelled via the fighting in the southeast to Turkey’s metropolises where it threatens to destroy the normal daily life of the region’s sole successful industrial economy.

- David Barchard has worked in Turkey as a journalist, consultant, and university teacher. He writes regularly on Turkish society, politics, and history, and is currently finishing a book on the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Women mourn near a coffin during a funeral ceremony in a mosque in Ankara on 14 March, 2016, for the victims of a suicide car bomb that ripped through a busy square in central Ankara the day before (AFP).