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The War in Turkey that Doesn’t Make Headlines
I know the neighborhood of today’s bombing in Istanbul, Sultanhamet, as well as my own face. Not far from the photos you saw in Tom’s post, I found my cat, the Smudge, as a tiny kitten — orphaned, starving, and dying of flea anemia. When I sat beside her, and she weakly crawled into my lap and began to purr.
I took her home, and here she is now beside me, a living connection to the many days, over so many years, that I walked through Sultanhamet — to show the famous sites to visiting friends, to stroll and talk for hours with the Turkish friends I’ve left behind and so badly miss, to shop in the covered market and the spice bazaar, to go, occasionally, for a morning run on the grounds of the Topkapı palace.
There were many terrorist attacks in Turkey when I lived there. This wasn’t the first. It won’t be the last. But I don’t think I could bear it, my heart would break, if Turkey were to suffer what Syria has. When an attack takes place on a site frequented by tourists, it makes international news. But the recrudescence of the civil war in the Southeast is the story that has the potential to tear Turkey apart, and this barely makes the news in the West at all.
By all accounts, ISIS is the wealthiest terrorist organization in the world. By far. In round numbers, ISIS is said to have a $2 billion stash, which is keeping it afloat. Most of it comes from oil sales. Much of it comes from plundered banking funds. And the rest of it comes from taxing locals, selling stolen antiquities, and kidnapping ransoms.
From all the accounts I can see from here, The Iraqi Security Forces have made major gains in Ramadi and recaptured key terrain. The city is strategically and symbolically critical: It sits on the Euphrates and a highway linking Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders; further up the Euphrates is the Haditha Dam, which generates power not only for Anbar, but other parts of Iraq.
Two particularly interesting comments came up at the tail end of 
It’s difficult to overstate how poorly Barack Obama performed at Monday’s press conference from the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey. As France deals with the aftermath of an ISIS attack leaving 132 dead (so far), hundreds wounded, and thousands of lives shattered, the ersatz leader of the free world responded with an embarrassing display of indifference, peevishness, and open contempt. He was less “President Obama” and more “Petulant Obama.”
As I watched President Obama’s press conference in Antalya, Turkey, I began to feel that I was seeing an historic moment unfold.
Foreign policy experts have repeated the same sentence over and over: “There is no military solution in Syria.” Being professionally trained to automatically question and contradict any opinion held by a very large majority, I have trouble buying this.
Well, goodness. Think anyone’s going to notice that? I hope not. It might make future allies a little uneasy about allying with us.
Today’s report on the unbelievably fraught, perilous, unstable, and ghastly state of the world is brought to you by Russia’s пропаганда organ Sputnik News. (I still cannot believe they gave it that Leika-the-Space-Dog of a name: Didn’t they market test that? Hell, maybe they did — maybe I’m just old as dirt and these new-fangled Millennials think Sputnik sounds like a totally credible name for a Russian newspaper.)
(Note: These are photos of southeast Turkey, in 2013.)
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.