The attackers who set about their deadly mission at Istanbul Ataturk Airport on Tuesday evening did so with but one intent on their minds — to kill and maim as many innocent people as possible. Sadly, given the dozens killed and scores injured, these bloody-minded terrorists succeeded in making a murderous statement — one that Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım has attributed to the work of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
This is not the first time that an international airport has been targeted. It was only three months ago when the authorities in Belgium grappled with an attack on the Brussels airport as part of a coordinated assault on their capital and its transport hub.
And over the past year too, the people of Turkey have had to endure a series of bombings, perpetrated by a range of killers driven by a range of causes. Whether it be open spaces in Ankara, tourist sites in Istanbul, frontier towns that border the broken state of Syria ... innocent people have been killed and maimed by a succession of blasts, all too often. In the past days too, terrorists struck in Jordan and Lebanon — attacks that added to the body count claimed by Daesh.
On the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, these terrorists have cut and run as the territory of the self-proclaimed caliphate tightens around their beck. How long now before the battle for Raqqa begins, the last redoubt of these thugs. But beating them on the battlefield is one thing, dealing with the fallout of their end is another. The reality is that the collapse of Daesh has resulted in the dissemination of radicalised terrorists, who have the ability to act in small cells. Emboldened by their philosophy and with little to fear other than death itself, embarking on attacks such as that on Tuesday will now become more frequent. And harder to prevent.
The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces enemies on many fronts. It has renewed its military campaign against the Kurdish Workers Party and has struggled to deal effectively — for a myriad of reasons — with the threat provided by a seemingly porous border with Syria. It seems extraordinary, for example that for many months, Daesh filled the caliphate’s coffers with dollars earned from crude exports into Turkey. The effects of that porous border may lie in the debris of Ataturk airport. There can be no letup in the fight against terrorism ever — from any quarter.
