Dublin protested last night against ISIS and the support it has received to date from the Turkish state. The protest was called by Lookleft in the aftermath of the Suruc bombing. 32 humanitarian volunteers on the way to help in the rebuilding of Kobane were killed in the bombing, at least 2 anarchists were amongst those killed.
The bomb went off on Monday at a community centre in Suruç a small mostly Kurdish town just across the border in the Turkish state. The Amara Culture Centre which was where 300 people on a Federation of Socialist Youth Associations stayed on their way to Kobane. 32 of them were killed by the bomb including at least two anarchists and over 100 injured, some critically.
Dublin protested last night against ISIS and the support it has received to date from the Turkish state. The protest was called by Lookleft in the aftermath of the Suruc bombing. 32 humanitarian volunteers on the way to help in the rebuilding of Kobane were killed in the bombing, at least 2 anarchists were amongst those killed.
The bomb went off on Monday at a community centre in Suruç a small mostly Kurdish town just across the border in the Turkish state. The Amara Culture Centre which was where 300 people on a Federation of Socialist Youth Associations stayed on their way to Kobane. 32 of them were killed by the bomb including at least two anarchists and over 100 injured, some critically.
They were going to go to Kobane to help rebuild, photos on Twitter have showed the boxes of children toys they were bringing with them. The bombing was the work of ISIS whom have suffered a major set back at the hands of the YPG/J in Syria who are fighting to build a society based around gender liberation, environmentalism and socialism.
The protest was at the Turkish embassy because the Turkish state has been aiding ISIS, partly to try and prevent a Kurdish autonomous zone being formed in Rojava. The Turkish state has been allowing ISIS to cross the border and it’s MIT secret police have been arming ISIS. Photos have shown arms convoys heading to the border and Turkish soldiers waving across the border at ISIS militants. It’s estimated at least 5000 new ISIS members have entered Syria from Turkey over the last two years. The co-operation was at its most blatant when in order to reduce the Turkish military guards at a tomb in Syria the Turkish military was able to send a convoy into Norther Syria and into the ISIS area to collect its personnel without incident. ( There is a useful summary of the evidence for co-operation )
The bombing and international reaction to it may be the ‘straw that broke the camels back’ in making the semi-covert aid Turkey was providing to ISIS unsustainable. It was routine for wounded ISIS fighters to cross into Turkey to be patched up and returned to combat. But the refusal of the Turkish military to allow a wounded ISIS fighter to cross into Turkey yesterday led to a firefight on the border in which at least one Turkish soldier was killed. That resulted in Turkish F16s attacking ISIS positions for the first time and even more significantly Turkey is now to allow the US to use airbases in Turkey. That’s quite a shift from quietly treating ISIS wounded so they could return to combat.
However this may turn out to be only a temporary shift to placate NATO. Turkish president Erdogan had declared he would stop at nothing to prevent a Kurdish state forming in Northern Syria and the mass murder attack in Kobane that killed almost 300 people happened shortly after he made that statement. The ISIS killers involved in that attack appear to have crossed the border from Turkey. The attack in Suruc may well have seen the involvement of MIT, those targeted were asking how the suicide bomber somehow evaded the Turkish military searches everyone else entering the area was forced to go through.
Some 5,000 police mounted raids in Istanbul and 13 other districts. The Turkish state has presented these to the international media as being mostly directed at ISIS but Kurds on Twitter say they were mostly directed against Kurds and leftists and most of the 251 arrested were not ISIS. 182 were HDP and DBP members and the one person killed in the raids was described as "Leftist Gunay Özarslan, who was shot & killed by Turkish police during their so-called "anti-ISIS" ops in Istanbul." So even if the Turkish state is changing policy and turning against ISIS it is not reducing its greater hostility to the Kurds. A point of concern is that the Turkish government said it notified the Syrian Assad regime of its airstrikes in advance, if that regime eventually wins the civil war it will certainly try and crush the Rojava experiment so Erdogan may be deciding that is the safer bet.
In the video of the protest you will hear more details of what happened and what the role of the Turkish state has been before the names of 31 of those killed are read out and you are told what they were doing in life before it was cut short in Mondays explosion.
WORDS & VIDEO PRODUCTION: Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )