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The Attack on the US Consulate in Istanbul
This was the most minor of the day’s terrorist attacks in Turkey. Today alone, a car bomb exploded in front of a police station in Istanbul. One police officer and two assailants were killed. A recently founded, far-left organization called the People’s Defense Unit claimed the attack. The PKK killed four police officers with a mine attack on an armored police vehicle in the southeastern province of Şırnak’s Silopi district. PKK militants opened fire on a military helicopter in Şırnak’s Beytüşşebap district, killing one soldier. It has been a very violent day, in a violent month.
The attack on the US consulate has been attributed — almost certainly correctly — to the DHKP-C. The assailants were two middle-aged women, perhaps brain-damaged — as many of their members are — from years of prison hunger strikes. The DHKP-C is one of Turkey’s weirder terrorist groups. Hardcore Marxist-Leninists. I wrote about their last attack on the US Embassy in Istanbul here:
Americans seem surprised that the February 1 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Marxist—specifically, by a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or DHKP/C. But no one in Turkey was remotely surprised. This diagram suggests why Turks recoil when asked about the hard-left militant groups here.
They’re no joke, despite their names, which call to mind nothing so much as the Judean People’s Front scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. For reasons yet to be properly explored, these groups don’t appear to know that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. They are ideologically pickled in aspic, dedicated to a Marxist-Leninist revolution that happened nearly a century ago and failed brutally everywhere.
Many conspiracy theories circulate about these leftist groups. (The reason so many Turks are conspiracy theorists is that there are so many actual conspiracies in Turkey.) Some hold that rogue elements of the state or hostile neighboring countries sustain these organizations so that they can be activated, when needed, to cause chaos. These ideas are neither entirely implausible nor entirely logical, but it is certainly true that European countries have been slow or altogether unwilling to extradite suspected members of these groups, which has done little to dampen Turkish suspicions. …
… a Syrian connection is circumstantially and historically plausible [in the Embassy bombing]. Bedri Yağan, the Number Two man in the DHKP/C’s precursor organization, Dev-Sol, was despatched in 1990 to the Bekaa Valley (in eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border) to receive training in guerrilla warfare, as were many members of the organization.
During the 1970s, a faction of Dev Sol managed, in two years, to kill 35 security personnel, 23 members of the military, and 230 civilians. In 1980, it killed former prime minister Nihat Erim and his bodyguard. Dev-Sol murdered an American insurance executive, John Gandy, in 1991, writing anti-American slogans in his blood on the walls of his office. The group was responsible for scores of bombings against Americans that year, including an attack on the American consulate in Adana, an attack on the Turkish-American association in Izmir, two on the Turkish-American association in Adana, and — in one day — 13 bombings of businesses associated with Americans. Also in 1991, it assassinated two U.S. military personnel, wounded an Air Force officer, and bombed more than 20 American and NATO military, commercial, and cultural facilities. And again in 1991, the DHKP/C took credit for shooting and killing Andrew Blake, head of the British Commercial Union in Istanbul. In 1996, the DHKP/C assassinated Özdemir Sabancı, a prominent Turkish businessman, and two of his associates. A female suicide bomber accidentally detonated herself in an Ankara restroom in 2003. In 2004, in what is assumed to have been another accidental detonation, Semiran Polat killed himself and three passengers on a bus, injuring many more. A suicide attack on a police station in Istanbul’s Sultangazi district on September 11, 2012, killed a police officer and the attacker. (September 11 is an infamous date in Turkey, too: it was the eve, in 1980, of the overthrow of the civilian government in a military coup commonly believed to have enjoyed American support.)
The list goes on. According to official reports, the DHKP/C committed 2,503 terrorist acts between 1995 and 2006. They kill policemen. They kill judges. They kill tourists. They kill bystanders. As a bonus, they also kill each other. Journalists in Turkey speculate that they killed the victims of the U.S. Embassy bombing because someone wanted to send amessage. Perhaps so. But the only message worth taking away is that they are murderers.
The organisation was originally formed in 1978 by Dursun Karataş as Revolutionary Left (Turkish: Devrimci Sol or Dev Sol), a splinter faction of Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), which splintered from the People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C), which in its turn was a splinter of the Revolutionary Youth Federation (commonly known in Turkish as Dev Genç).
In 1994 factional infighting within Dev Sol resulted in two factions: the main group led by Dursun Karatas was renamed DHKP/C, while Bedri Yağan created a new THKP-C (not to be confused with the original one).
In all cases of “Parti-Cephe” (Party-/Front) names, “Party” refers to the group’s political activities, while “Front” is a reference to a group’s military operations. Theoretically they are separate entities. The group espouses a Marxist-Leninist ideology and holds anti-U.S., anti- NATO positions. It considers the Turkish government to be under the control of Western imperialism, and seeks to destroy this control by violent means.
I’d be curious to know with what kind of weapon they tried to hit the consulate. There’s no way to hit it with a light weapon from the street and do any damage to anyone inside it. The Consulate is a fortress, and a case study in “good perimeter security.” You’d pretty much need an RPG even to make a dent in the wall if you were shooting from the street; and obviously, you couldn’t get up the hill it’s perched upon carrying one without being spotted by security.
So I assume this was more a protest-suicide than an attack. If so, they’d have been much more successful in achieving their goal if they’d set themselves on fire outside the embassy.
I hope the news of this attack will prompt Americans — those in the White House especially — to pay attention to the rest of the violence in Turkey. Dov Friedman has a good post about this up today at The American Interest: The Unintended Consequences of the U.S.-Turkey Deal:
It only took a dozen years, but we might finally have the answer to the question, “What would the Iraq War’s early days have looked like had Turkey joined the U.S.-led coalition in 2003?” If the last two weeks are any indication, we should be relieved the Turks punted the first time around. …
Read it all.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
I can’t get my head around this stuff anymore.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” -Hunter S. Thompson
Has anyone brought up the Russians in this context? Because those “Syrian” training camps were, like those in Libya, etc., largely instruments of the Soviet terrorist “Bombintern.” Not that grads might not have had their own agendas and gone their own ways, but if you’re looking for a paymaster or patron, the Chekists seem a plausible candidate.
OK. So was this an attack by a violent fringe group and which surprised the security forces, or was it an attack connived at by the security forces (who seem to be conniving at the activity of ISIS recruiters) for political reasons?
Here’s an interesting discussion of the economic ramifications of what Erdogan is up to.
Claire,
Let’s talk Turkish politics not how American policy can miraculously control things one way or the other. Erdogan can go one of two ways. First, the old way. He wrecks the new Kurdish party, becomes President for Life, and shoots it out with PKK and the Marxist-Leninist party dejour. Second, the new way. He embraces the new Kurdish party. He uses them to differentiate between Kurds he can deal with and those too far gone into the Marxist-Leninist twilight zone. He still may be forced to fight it out with the twilight zone but it doesn’t mean the end of Turkish democracy. A non-Erdogan Turkish government would be in the same position and be forced to make the same choices. Marxist-Leninist mashugganahs are never satisfied. Let’s not fall for the old “it’s all the fault of the Americans & NATO” garbage just this once.
American foreign policy should encourage the new way and certainly not assist the old way. I want those airfields Claire. Sometimes I’d just like to punch Obama in the mouth. I guess that really wouldn’t help either.
Regards,
Jim
Claire, it is nothing short of astonishing that you are able to keep all this stuff straight.
An aside: does the Turk on the sokak think that the 1980 coup was a rogue U.S. intelligence operation, or do they discern the hand of Jimmy Carter, Machiavellian mastermind?
Thanks, Claire.
My head spins, but thank you for sharing this.
Of course some of these groups were originally set up/financed by the Soviets (some through the Bulgaria connection), but they’ve got their own indigenous life now. No one like Putin would want to use a group like DHKP/C for anything — consider what happened to their brains, literally, after those hunger strikes. They don’t seem to understand that the Wall fell. If they didn’t keep killing people, I would feel the deepest of pity for them.
No, it’s not — it would be if I studied Turkish radical left groups as some weird hobby, but if you live in a place, and if they’re part of your environment and the memory of everyone you talk to, it’s something you learn about in a fairly normal way, because the mind tends to take note of “hazards.” Just like if you spend a long time camping, you’d learn in a pretty deep way what berries are poisonous — even if the botany book that described the subtle difference among these berries might look really boring and complex.
Yes. And they may be right to suspect the US either had some role in it, or didn’t find it objectionable. If I had world enough and time, and if the archives were open, I’d love to know.
While he was hardly a Machiavellian mastermind, it would not be unreasonable to think that after the Iranian Revolution, he might have been easily manipulated by Kenan Evren into believing the coup had forestalled something similar in Turkey. Of course, no such thing was in prospect. And the coup was a disaster the effects from which Turkey still hasn’t recovered.
Far too late. He’s poisoned years of cultivating relations with conservative Kurds in the southeast in the past few weeks.
That’s what he should have done, but as you know, I suspect he was too set on the Palace — probably because otherwise the corruption charges would have caught up with him.
Some of them. A non-Erdogan government wouldn’t be saddled with the Erdogan burden of having to keep him and his family out of jail, which would give it a lot more flexibility to act in the interests of the country.
These leftist splinter groups most certainly aren’t our fault. Nor are they more than a nuisance. They attack Americans and their embassies because it’s the only way anyone would ever pay attention to them. And since the embassy and consulate in Turkey are very well guarded, they never end up hurting anyone but other Turks and themselves.
You don’t just want the airfields. You want a stable, peaceful, democratic Turkey that’s not a threat to itself or its neighbors.
Yes, but I doubt it even surprised them. These cells have been quite active lately. I doubt these women even got very close to the consulate, and as you can see, the security forces responded appropriately — and did not respond as if they were surprised.
I reckon it was just as reported. This has happened before, and it’s pretty typical of this group.
It’s not just what he’s up to — the PKK bears a large share of responsibility for this — but yes, this is devastating for Turkey in many, many ways.
So Ms Berlinski putting words in my mouth are you. I Proconsul of Pax America, I the new No. 1 of NeoConSpectre (my first action was to hire Trump’s interior decorator for a complete redo of the hollowed out volcano. It looks fabulous!) am expected to be concerned about a stable, peaceful, democratic Turkey that’s not a threat to itself or its neighbors!!!
Where’s the fun in that?!
Regards,
Jim
We spent 5 days in Istanbul in August, and I really, really liked the Turks. Several of our friends here agree. Turks remind us of Israelis.
I wish them the best.