Turkey’s latest outbreak of terrorism was hatched in an Internet cafe in this mountain-ringed southeastern Kurdish town, investigators say. A sign on the wall of the Bingol Internet Merkezi Cafe warns users that it is "definitely banned to enter sites ... targeting the state, country and its inseparable integrity and constitutional order." Most of the users, teenage boys engrossed in noisy games of computer soccer, seem happy to comply.
| Normal teenage boys are more concerned with games, sports and the occasional babe... |
But two other young men — the son of one cafe owner and the brother of the other — who came here regularly, blew themselves up in the suicide bombings last weekend that set Turkey reeling. Police raided the cafe this week and confiscated files, apparently on suspicion that the cafe may have linked the bombers to the larger world of Islamic terrorism, including al-Qaida.
| All the little ones and zeroes don't care where they go... |
Accessible only by a winding two-lane road, the town first hit the front pages when an earthquake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale killed more than 170 in the area in early May. Shock waves struck again last week when Turkish leaders named it as the hometown of two suicide bombers who killed themselves and 23 others and injured 300 more when they detonated explosives-laden Isuzu pick-ups in front of two synagogues in Istanbul last Saturday. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said the two had visited Afghanistan. Turkish media reported that one trained in Iran in 2001. U.S. intelligence officials said both trained in al Qaida camps in Afghanistan, and returned to Turkey in 2001. Police now are investigating two accomplices, at least one of them from Bingol, who left Turkey on Oct. 28 for Dubai. The pair slipped back into Turkey to carry out Thursday’s suicide bombings at the British consulate and London-based HSBC bank headquarters in Istanbul, the Turkish daily Hurriyet reported Friday.
| That kind of implies Bingol's a local navel of terrorism, doesn't it? |
These three are accused of planning the attacks under the noses of Turkish troops who rule Bingol with an iron grip. How they got away with it shows how hard it is to prevent terrorism. One possible explanation for the bombings lies in the sharp religious and political divisions among Kurds who’ve clashed among themselves for decades in their struggles for local autonomy. These divisions persist even if local extremist groups are no longer viable, said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a terrorism expert based in Ankara. With al-Qaida, "they learn about different groups coming up with more global solutions to what they are opposed to and latch on."
| The Turk-Kurdish tensions set up the conditions Qaeda tries to take advantage of... |
Residents in this town of 250,000 said they can’t believe one of their own would accept al-Qaida or its methods. No one likes Osama bin Laden and they abhor the recent attacks, they said. But most refused to talk to outsiders about them. The uncle of suicide bomber Gokhan Elaltuntas, 24, who Turkish officials said carried out the attack against the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul last Saturday made an exception. "This has put a total shame on the whole family," Sevfet Elaltuntas, 52, explained. "This does not really suit at all our family morals and virtues. The whole Elaltuntas family has good relations with the (Turkish) security and military. We are trades people and do business with them."
| That fits the pattern, too. It's not the poor and the dispossessed who make the Qaeda recruits, but the guys from the middle class. |
His uncle last talked to Elaltuntas two nights before the blast. The young man, who ran a cell phone shop in Istanbul, said he was coming home this weekend to celebrate the breaking of the Ramadan fast, after which he was scheduled to marry his fiancee from Turkey’s capital, Ankara. His nephew was so averse to bloodshed that he didn’t have the stomach to skin the fowl and rabbits he and his friends hunted, Elaltuntas said. "He must have been brainwashed in Istanbul. He wasn’t extremist, definitely not. He never expressed a political thought."
| The same people who go out and demonstrate in favor of the Bad Guys here are the ones who join PETA and ALF. |
Residents of Bingol take pride in their conservatism, and virtually all women here wear Islamic head scarves. There is no graffiti, pro-militant or otherwise, on buildings or walls. Sermons delivered in its mosques are written by Turkey’s state-run religious authority. Most men on the streets smoke cigarettes during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, when believers are supposed to abstain. But Turkish authorities say Bingol town and province are rife with Islamic extremists. Twelve "terrorists" were killed in the province on Wednesday night alone, Turkish justice minister Cemil Cicek told parliament Thursday. Authorities said most of them were part of a Kurdish faction called Turkish Hezbollah, a Sunni Islamic group with at most a few thousand followers not linked to the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group of the same name. The handful of Bingol residents who agreed to be interviewed claim the group formed in the early 1980s and was allowed to operate because its members fought against other autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels. "The state has built it, established it and then couldn’t handle it," said one 33-year-old businessman, who refused to give his name.
| "Dr. Frankenstein, call your office!" |
Disillusionment spread among these extremists, experts said, after last year’s election of an Islamic party that has tried to strengthen Turkey’s ties to the United States and sought Turkey’s admission into the European Union. "When you look at it from the perspective of al Qaida or Hezbollah, this government itself, although Islamic, represents the antithesis of (the extremists’) global agenda," Turkish columnist Semih Idiz told Israel Radio Thursday. "It’s a government that is showing that Islam and modernity are not mutually exclusive."
| So proper Islamists have to prove them wrong... |
Suicide bombers such as Elaltuntas don’t on the surface fit the profile of disillusioned extremists, however.
Neither did the 9/11 hijackers.
His uncle, Hassan Aktash, described him as very private and quiet. The second of six children, he barely left Bingol before his move to Istanbul. If he was passionate, it was about Turkish soccer, Aktash said. The other synagogue bomber, Mesut Cabuk, was an acquaintance, the uncle said. His nephew was a lifelong friend of Azad Ekinci, he added, the missing accomplice whose brother opened the Bingol Internet Merkezi Internet cafe with Elaltuntas’ father two years ago. "Gokhan was a normal Muslim," said Aktash, 31, who has managed the Internet cafe since Elaltuntas moved to Istanbul on May 10. "He practiced Namaz (prayers). He had a short beard, like me. He never expressed views about Osama bin Laden." Elaltuntas and Ekinci spent a lot of time together in the cafe, one of roughly a dozen in town, Aktash said. Aktash said he overheard Ekinci tell his brother in mid-October that he was going on a business trip to Dubai. Ekinci encountered al-Qaida during his travels, Sevfet Elaltuntas surmised. "The police told us that in twelve months, he was in Turkey two and outside the other ten," he said. |