In the wake of the horrendous attacks in Brussels, many ordinary people all over the world have been spontaneously reacting in a way that confirms such terrorism is most certainly a global issue more than a local one. Prior to the Brussels atrocities, at least eight attacks of similar deadly nature happened in various cities in Europe, Asia and Africa in March alone this year. It is enough to check Twitter to realise how true this is. Two random testimonies clearly prove this point.
Tweeting at 2:19pm, on March 22, 2016, @HamidMirGEO said: “Prayers for all the people in Brussels, Ankara, Istanbul, Grand Bassam and Peshawar. Good time to realise that all human beings are equal.” Bert Verbeke, @bert_verbeke, tweeting at 2:10pm, on March 22, 2016, said: “I prayed for Paris, I prayed for London, I prayed for Ankara. Now I pray for my own capital. But I will never surrender to fear.”
Earlier, on March 7, the target was in Shabqadar, a small town in the northwestern province of Pakistan, where the vast majority of the population belongs to the ethnic Pashtun community. It was a suicide bomber who viciously succeeded in passing through security check before he detonated his vest inside the sub-district courts. The attack was claimed by Taliban’s Jamaat-ur-Ahrar bloc, as a revenge for the execution of a man convicted of killing the governor of Punjab in 2011. The governor’s ‘crime’ according to the Taliban was: He had campaigned for changing the country’s blasphemy laws.
On March 21, gunmen opened fire at a hotel in the city of Bamako, Mali, where a European Union mission of almost 600 people work there, mostly French personnel and military experts. The available information tells us that the mission’s aim was to train Malian and other West African forces to combat militant groups active in the region. This mission was set up following the large French military intervention, on the direct order of France President, Francoise Hollande, to fight off militants’ take-over in the north of Mali in December 2012. The intervention, known as ‘Operation Serval’, ended in July 2014 and was replaced by ‘Operation Barkhane’, which was launched in August 2014.
On March 16, in Maiduguri, Nigeria, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque during pre-dawn prayer, in the outskirts of the city in the northeast region. The blast, according to reports, killed 24 worshippers in cold blood. The extremist group Boko Haram, known of its deadly use of female bombers, was behind the operation.
On the same day, in Peshawar, Pakistan, a blast killed at least 15 people and injured 30 travelling by a bus. That city is routinely targeted by Taliban terrorists. According to information, Lashkar-e-Islam, an affiliate of the Pakistani Taliban, planted an improvised explosive under the bus, which was transporting around 50 officials to their offices in the city.
On March 13, in Grand-Bassam, a resort in the outskirts of the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, gunmen belonging to Al Qaida in North Africa randomly opened fire at people enjoying a sunny day on the beach. Grand-Bassam, a popular palm tree-lined resort frequented by Ivorians and foreigners, was attacked by six gunmen who killed 14 civilians and two members of the elite security force.
On the same day, terror hit in the heart of Europe’s gate to the Middle East — in Ankara, Turkey. Militants from the insurgent group Kurdistan Freedom Hawks set off a car bomb in Kizily Square in the capital, killing 37 and injuring many others. The group declared the attack was in retaliation to the government’s military operations in the southeastern region. Since this murderous action, tension between the Kurds and the government has frightfully increased. If anything, it is difficult to predict how the situation will be brought under control in the coming weeks and months, since the Kizily Square incident is not the first of its kind in Turkey and unlikely to be the last.
On March 20, an earlier blast carried out by a suicide bomber, killed five people, including a terrorist, and injuring 30 others in the heart of Istanbul, on the bustling Istiklal Street. It was Mehmet Ozturk, a Turkish youth, born in 1992 in Gaziantep, near Syria’s borders, who carried out the heinous attack in Istanbul. It was established later on that he was a member of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
Commenting on the Turkish bombings after the Kizily Square incident, the highly-respected online publication, Politico Europe, went further to tweet at 9:11am on March 21, that Turkey has started to “look like Syria, as Ankara grapples with its own civil conflict”. This certainly reveals how vulnerable Turkey has become.
This might sound too dramatic under the circumstances, especially for a country that is practically situated as a ‘buffer Zone’ between Europe as a whole and the heart of the Arab world and the Middle East. With the largest Kurdish community in proportion to the entire Turkish population living in Turkey, any escalation may lead to widening the area of confrontation between the central authority and the Kurds. If Politico Europe’s prediction is to be taken any seriously, this is the appropriate historic moment for the European Union and the United States to take immediate action to hit Daesh and extremism in all its forms in the region.
The fact that Turkey’s neighbours Syria, Iraq and Iran, will naturally become the EU’s neighbours tomorrow, no matter whether Turkey breaks up or joins the EU. Therefore, action is required now. With Turkey as the second largest Nato member after Germany, Europe and the US are urgently required to shape policies to help the region and the world get rid of the scourge of terrorism.
Mustapha Karkouti is a former president of the Foreign Press Association, London. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@mustaphatache
