As I mentioned in my recent posts the main battleground between the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is currently the city of Hasakah. This sits at the heart of Syria's north-eastern Hasakah province and forms part of the southern border of the Kurdish Cizire Canton.
In order to give you a blow-by-blow account of how this fight is going I will have to learn every street and every district within the city. In the meantime though I gather that recently this battle has started to go rather badly for ISIL.
Today a suicide bomb exploded at a Kurdish community centre in the Turkish city of Suruc which sits right on the border with the Syrian Kurdish Kobane Canton. In fact the 30 killed and 100 wounded were all Kurdish activists who were preparing to visit the city of Kobane in order to help rebuild it following the long battle with ISIL that ended in January. Although there have been two confirmed ISIL attacks on Kobane that have been launched from Turkey this appears to be the first ISIL attack on Kurds inside of Turkey.
On June 7th 2015 (7/6/15) Turkey held a general election. The main objective for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist Justice & Development Party (AKP) was to secure a two thirds Parliamentary majority. This would have allowed them to make changes to the nation's constitution without having to put those changes to public referendum. No doubt the first change AKP wanted to make was to grant executive powers to the largely symbolic President's office allowing Erdogan to continue to run the country even though he'd completed his term limits as Prime Minister. Failing that AKP wanted to secure a simple Parliamentary majority that would allow them to put constitutional changes to a public referendum.
As it turns out AKP failed to achieve either of these objectives and only succeed in emerging as the largest party in Parliament with 258 MP's - 17 short of a majority. Neither the Republican People's Party (CHP) who came second with 132 MP's nor the Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) who came joint third with 80 MP's are prepared to work with AKP because of Erdogan. However in order to form a government CHP and HDP would have to work with the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) who refuse to work with HDP. Since then AKP and MHP have been struggling to form a coalition. My suspicion is that AKP are actually trying to force a fresh election in the hope of doing better next time.
In the meantime Turkey is effectively being run by the civil service. Despite Erdogan launching numerous purges such as the "Sledgehammer" case in order to pack the Turkish establishment with Islamists the majority of them still swear allegiance to uphold the nation's constitution and the aggressively secular ideals of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Needless to say they have been much less tolerant of ISIL. Although I've not been keeping a running tally since the start of July Turkey has managed to arrest around 80 ISIL members operating in the country significantly restricting the flow of ISIL fighters into Syria.
As such I think ISIL's main motive behind today's attack was to intimidate Turkey into ending it's crackdown. They may even be trying to collapse coalition talks between AKP and MHP in the hope of scaring Turks into voting for AKP and security in a future election.
Plus I think they're still a bit sore about the Battle of Kobane.
19:50 on 20/7/15 (UK date).
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