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Turkey blasts: Real suspects
silent
By B Raman
It has been
reported that Turkish officials suspect that Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda might have been behind the twin suicide
car bomb explosions near two synagogues in Istanbul on
November 15, that killed at least 23 people. Though the
explosions were targeted to kill Jews doing their
morning prayers, they seem to have killed more
passers-by, Jews as well as Muslims, than Jewish
worshippers. More than 250 persons were injured. Many of
the shops in the vicinity of the synagogues are owned by
Jews.
One of the targeted synagogues (Neve
Shalom) was reported to have been partially destroyed
and the other (Beit Israel) damaged. A member of the
local Jewish community has been quoted as saying that at
least six of those killed were Jews, thereby indicating
the possibility that more Muslims than Jews might have
died. Istanbul has an estimated Jewish population of
about 20,000, with 17 synagogues. The Neve Shalom
synagogue was also the scene of an attack in 1986, when
Palestinian gunmen killed 22 worshippers and wounded six
others during a Sabbath service.
The
responsibility for the blasts has been claimed by an
indigenous organization called the Turkish Great Eastern
Islamic Raiders Front (IBDA-C), which advocates an
Islamic rule based on the Sharia in Turkey and a leftist
economic ideology. A telephone call from an individual
claiming to be from this organization is reported to
have said: "The reason [for the attacks] is to stop the
oppression of the Muslims ... Our acts will continue."
In the past, there were allegations of its
having had links at different times with the
intelligence agencies of Greece, the erstwhile Soviet
Union and Iran. Though Turkish officials have been
treating this organization as a terrorist one and have
been unsuccessfully pressing the European Union to
declare it so too, they say that they do not take
seriously, for the present, its claims of having
organized the November 15 blasts. It was not known to
have the kind of expertise required for this purpose, or
to have at its disposal volunteers for suicide
terrorism.
While Turkish officials have been
pointing the needle of suspicion at al-Qaeda, some
Israeli analysts seem to suspect a possible role by the
Iran-backed Hezbollah and/or the Iraq-based Kurdish
extremist group called the Ansar al-Islam, which the
United States has accused, with no satisfactory
evidence, of having links with al-Qaeda.
Before
April, 2002, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the
International Islamic Front (IIF) formed by him in 1998
had not directly attacked Israeli or Jewish targets,
though the objective of the IIF has been described as
waging a jihad against the Crusaders and the Jewish
people. They had left operations against Israeli and
Jewish targets to the Palestine Liberation Organization,
its al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad
and Hezbollah.
In a departure from this
practice, elements suspected to have been associated
with al-Qaeda or the IIF carried out an attack through
the explosion of a fuel tanker outside a synagogue on
the Tunisian island of Djerba on April 11, 2002. The
blast killed 14 German tourists, a French citizen and
four Tunisians. Initially, Western intelligence
officials had doubts whether this was an accidental
explosion or a terrorist strike, but, subsequently, they
concluded that it was a terrorist strike.
On May
17, 2002, the Asharq al-Awsat, an Arabic newspaper
published from London, quoted one Abdel Azeem
al-Muhajir, whom it described as a "senior military
leader" of al-Qaeda living in Pakistan, as claiming that
al-Qaeda carried out the attack. In an interview to the
journal which, it said, was conducted in Pakistan, he
said: "The attack was carried out by brothers in the
al-Qaeda network."
The journal also said that
al-Muhajir identified the truck driver who carried out
the synagogue attack as Nizar Seif Eddin al-Tunisi. Seif
Eddin al-Tunisi means "Sword of the Faith, the
Tunisian". His name had also figured in earlier
speculation in the Tunisian media. Before this
interview, al Quds, another Arabic newspaper published
from London, had claimed that the attack was carried out
by the Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy
Sites, which had once also claimed responsibility for
the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania.
In a subsequent report, the Associated
Press quoted an Afghanistan-based source as saying that
al-Muhajir is also known as Abu Bilal al-Muhajir and is
a Palestinian of Jordanian nationality. The source said
that he was only a middle ranker in al-Qaeda and not a
senior military leader.
On June 23, 2002, the
Aljazeera television station broadcast an audio tape
purported to be of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, described as a
spokesman of al-Qaeda, in which he claimed that al-Qaeda
was responsible for the Tunisian attack. He said: "The
attack was carried out by the al-Qaeda network. A youth
could not see his brothers in Palestine butchered and
murdered ... [while] he saw Jews cavorting in Djerba."
His use of the word "network" gave rise to the
possibility that the attack might have been carried out
by a Tunisian organization associated with the IIF and
not by al-Qaeda itself.
American officials were
projecting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the probable
mastermind of the Tunisian blast, but it is not clear
whether his interrogation after his arrest in Rawalpindi
in Pakistan in March last has confirmed their suspicion.
Tunisian authorities detained an individual in
connection with the attack, but further details about
him are not known. Last year, they prosecuted 34 persons
- 31 in absentia - on a charge of belonging to al-Jamaa
wal Sunnah, a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda,
but there was no claim that any of them were linked to
the blast.
The Tunisian attack was followed by a
car bomb explosion outside a Mombasa (Kenya) hotel
frequented by Israeli tourists and an unsuccessful
attempt to bring down an Israeli plane carrying tourists
home through a surface-to-air missile in November last
year. Al-Qaeda or Somalian elements connected to it were
suspected, but there has been no definite proof so far.
The Istanbul explosions are the third instance
of direct targeting of Israeli or Jewish people and
interests by elements linked to al-Qaeda and the IIF. In
the past, while there have been reports of arrests of
individual elements linked to al-Qaeda in Turkey, there
were no reports or even allegations of any of the
terrorist organizations of Turkey having links with
al-Qaeda or the IIF.
The report on the Patterns
of Global Terrorism during 2002 submitted by the State
Department to the US Congress in April last stated as
follows on al-Qaeda-related activities from Turkish
territory: "Till November 15 [2002], Turkish authorities
have arrested several suspected terrorists who may be
linked to al-Qaeda. In August, authorities arrested
Mevlut Kar, a Turkish citizen suspected of being an
Islamic terrorist, at the Ankara airport. In April,
Turkish authorities arrested four individuals associated
with al-Qaeda in Bursa. Three members of the Union of
Imams, a Jordanian group with links to al-Qaeda, were
arrested in February in Van. The individuals were
suspected of planning a bombing attack in Israel.
Subsequently, Turkish police arrested Ahmet Abdullah, a
courier from northern Iraq, for providing assistance to
the Union of Imams."
The report stated as
follows on the activities of groups not known to be
linked to al-Qaeda: "The government of Turkey continued
to take steps against domestic terrorist groups. Turkish
authorities arrested several members from the
Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) -
a virulently anti-US group that killed two US defense
contractors and wounded a US Air Force officer during
the Gulf War. Although the group did not conduct any
attacks in 2002, Turkish officials have expressed
displeasure that the group's leadership is ensconced in
Western Europe. The European Union included the DHKP/ C
on its terrorism list in May. Turkish arrests also
weakened Turkish Hezbollah, a Kurdish Islamic (Sunni)
extremist group that is unrelated to Lebanese Hezbollah.
In December, authorities arrested Ali Aslan Isik,
reportedly one of the group's top leaders. The group's
last attack in October 2001 killed two Turkish police
officers in Istanbul."
Of the indigenous
terrorist groups, the DHKP/C has shown the required
motivation for suicide terrorism. In 2001, it had
carried out two suicide attacks against policemen, but
it is a Marxist-Leninist organization with no suspected
links to pro-bin Laden jihadi groups.
Presuming
that al-Qaeda or the IIF carried out the twin blasts in
Istanbul, they could not have done this without local
support or involvement. The IBDA-C could have been an
accomplice, but al-Qaeda and the IIF do not generally
collaborate with organizations having a leftist
ideology. The other section of the Turkish society from
which accomplices could have come are members of the
local Chechen and Uighur communities - Chechens from
Russia as well as Arab nationals of Chechen origin. The
intelligence agencies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey have
been among the major external financiers of Chechen
terrorism in Russia and Uighur terrorism in China.
Both Chechen and Uighur terrorists were trained
in the camps of bin Laden in Afghanistan before October
7, 2001, and many of them look up to him for
inspiration. They would be inclined to cooperate with
al-Qaeda or the IIF despite the financial assistance
received by them from Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the
past.
Among the possible reasons for the action
of al-Qaeda or the IIF in targeting Turkey, one could
cite the following:
Turkey's post-1994 assistance to Rashid Dostum, an
Uzbek leader in Afghanistan. Turkey gave him shelter
when he was driven out of Mazar-e-Sharif by the Taliban
after it captured Kabul in September, 1996, and gave him
financial and arms assistance. In the long confrontation
between the Northern Alliance on the one side and the
Taliban and al-Qaeda on the other, while Russia, India
and Iran backed the late Ahmed Shah Masoud, Turkey
backed Dostum.
Turkey's active role in the International Security
Assistance Force in Kabul to which it has contributed a
contingent.
Its decision, since reversed, to send troops to Iraq
to help out the US.
Its close relations with Israel and the perceived
cooperation between the intelligence agencies of the two
countries.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail:
corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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