Islamic State shows new strategy with Istanbul attack

The latest Islamic State (ISIS) bombing in Turkey, which killed 11 tourists, marks a change in the group’s strategy.

Ten Germans and one Peruvian were killed, and at least a dozen injured in a suicide bombing in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet neighborhood on Tuesday.

“Clearly the Sultanahmet bombing was aimed at Turkish economic interests [and] the sense of security inside Turkey for foreigners,” Aaron Stein, a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East told The Media Line.

In three separate bombings in Turkey last year blamed on ISIS (also known as IS or ISIL), in which 139 people died, only Kurds and leftist supporters of the Kurdish movement were targeted. ISIS is fighting a war in Syria with the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“The other [ISIS] bombings [in Turkey] were aimed at the Kurdish nationalist movement and as a tangential side benefit [to ISIS], have helped to increase ethnic tensions, and is therefore linked to all of the problems and violence that’s going on in the southeast right now,” Stein said.

The Turkish state has been fighting with the PKK and its offshoots in urban centers in Turkey’s mostly Kurdish southeast since last summer. One of the Kurdish supporters’ grievances is that the government either supports ISIS or does nothing to protect its citizens sympathetic to the Kurdish cause.

On Wednesday night, a large car bomb detonated beside a police station in Çınar, a small town outside Diyarbakır. Six people, including a baby and two children, were killed in the attack, one of the largest since the resumption of fighting. Authorities blamed the PKK.

Officials said the Sultanahmet suicide bomber was ISIS member Nabil Fadli, a 28-year-old Saudi Arabian who moved to Syria when he was eight.

ISIS actually changed strategy and expanded its target list in Turkey several months ago says Gareth Jenkins, a senior fellow at the Silk Road Studies Program.

“Turkish authorities were very much aware that there had been a shift (in ISIS targeting), and that foreigners in Turkey were very much at risk.” Jenkins told The Media Line.

He says Turkish authorities have recently foiled several ISIS-linked plots, such as one aimed at a central district in Ankara on New Year’s Eve.

Jenkins says the change in strategy aims at hitting Turkey’s $30 billion tourism sector, of which Germans are a major part, and probably comes as a result of Ankara finally cracking down on ISIS fighters on its territory.

“There is certainly a deterioration in relations between the Turkish state, particularly [national intelligence agency] MİT of course, and various groups within ISIS,” Jenkins said.

He says in the past, the government allowed ISIS to operate on its territory.

“There seemed to be an agreement going back 18 months or so, that Turkey wouldn’t interfere with the transit of militant recruits [or supplies] and in return ISIS either wouldn’t target Turkey or conduct any operations inside Turkey.”

Terrorism expert Dr. Nihat Ali Özcan says the jihadist group poses a grave threat to Turkey.

“ISIL has a lot of sleeper cells in Turkey,” enough “to create instability and fear,” he told The Media Line.

Stein says the government’s primary security concern will always be the PKK, but that since around March of last year, “the fight against the Islamic State is a close second.”

Security officials quoted in local media claim the military captured 961 ISIS fighters in 2015. The government says it has blocked 35,690 ISIS-linked individuals from 124 countries from entering Turkey, and deported 2,700 suspected jihadists from 89 countries.

But Jenkins says Turkey’s efforts are too little, too late.

“There has been more done but it’s still nowhere near as much as should be done,” he said. “Now it’s too late to shut the door, both in terms of foreign jihadists […] but also young radicalized Turks and Kurds. Even if Turkey implements an effective campaign now, you’re still talking about damage limitation and not prevention.”

He says compared to other minor threats, such as the ongoing feud with people linked to Pennsylvania-based Islamic preacher and government rival Fethullah Gülen, the government is allocating a small amount of resources to combatting ISIS.

“Jihadists should be the priority now for Turkey.”

Fadli, the Sultanahmet bomber, entered Turkey on January 5 and given his fingerprints to immigration officials. Despite the fact that Fadli’s brother had blown himself up at an airport in Syria, Fadli wasn’t put on a watch list.

Dr. Olivier Roy, renowned political Islam expert at the European University Institute, says the Sultanahmet attack was part of a broader ISIS strategy, and that attacks will increase in the future.

“ISIS is now stuck in Syria. They’ve been unable to make territorial gains. They’re losing some ground in Iraq,” Roy told The Media Line. “So they’re now exporting the movement the way al Qaeda did, globalizing it.”

He says the Turkish government must step up its efforts at dealing with the threat.

“They can’t ignore it. ISIS is attacking Turkey. Even if the government is reluctant to be more involved and would prefer ISIS to fight the Kurds, they have no choice now.”

Stein says it’s harder now to cross the 511-mile Turkish-Syrian border, but more can still be done.

“What Ankara needs to do is completely seal off that final stretch of border with the Islamic State.”

After the ISIS-linked suicide bombing in Suruç last July, the Turkish government announced a plan to build a 90-mile wall and a 227-mile trench along the border.

Last year, Turkey effectively shut its land border to Syrian asylum seekers, and on January 8 it enacted a new policy requiring visas for Syrians arriving by air.

As of mid-November, Turkey had registered almost 2.2 million Syrians. Stein says Turkish authorities will likely be paying more attention to them from now on.

“The rules that are already in place to try and limit the movement of refugees inside Turkey will be more strictly enforced.”
Flowers, candles, a Turkish and a Syrian flag at a makeshift memorial in tribute to the victims of deadly attack, on January 13 in the Istanbul's tourist hub of Sultanahmet. (Photo: )