Turkey keeps security focus on Kurds despite threat from IS

[Anthea]

In the hours after a suicide bomber killed 10 foreigners in the heart of historic Istanbul, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed Turkey’s diplomats.

By then, the shattered body of a 28 year-old Syrian man had been found next to the dead western tourists and it had become clear that the attack was related somehow to the war in Syria.

However, Mr Erdogan spent just a few minutes talking about this latest threat to security, which his government blamed on Isis. For the next half an hour, as a nationwide hunt for the perpetrators kicked off, he railed instead against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK.

His speech, broadcast live on almost all Turkish television channels, captured his government’s almost single-minded focus on Kurdish separatists at a time when the threat from Isis, which has been tied to the past three major terror attacks in Turkey, remains unabated. Government officials, both publicly and privately, insist that Turkey’s terrorist problem is primarily one of Kurdish militancy, not Isis, and resources have been distributed accordingly. A large military force was deployed to Kurdish enclaves in the past month.

“Turkey has many terrorist groups, so it needs to make a priority list, and others come after the PKK,” said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a military expert at Tepav, a think-tank in Ankara. “Politicians speak about domestic issues which bring them votes, and Isis doesn’t bring votes.”

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