Ireland wsm.ie: Dublin protest against Suruc massacre outside Turkish embassy

 wsm.ie: Dublin protest against Suruc massacre outside
Turkish embassy (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)

Dublin protested last night against ISIS and the support it has received to date from the 
Turkish state. The protest was called by Lookleft in the aftermath of the Suruc bombing. 
32 humanitarian volunteers on the way to help in the rebuilding of Kobane were killed in 
the bombing, at least 2 anarchists were amongst those killed. ---- The bomb went off on 
Monday at a community centre in Suruç a small mostly Kurdish town just across the border 
in the Turkish state. The Amara Culture Centre which was where 300 people on a Federation 
of Socialist Youth Associations stayed on their way to Kobane. 32 of them were killed by 
the bomb including at least two anarchists and over 100 injured, some critically. ---- 
They were going to go to Kobane to help rebuild, photos on Twitter have showed the boxes 
of children toys they were bringing with them. The bombing was the work of ISIS whom have 
suffered a major set back at the hands of the YPG/J in Syria who are fighting to build a 
society based around gender liberation, environmentalism and socialism.

The protest was at the Turkish embassy because the Turkish state has been aiding ISIS, 
partly to try and prevent a Kurdish autonomous zone being formed in Rojava. The Turkish 
state has been allowing ISIS to cross the border and it's MIT secret police have been 
arming ISIS. Photos have shown arms convoys heading to the border and Turkish soldiers 
waving across the border at ISIS militants. It's estimated at least 5000 new ISIS members 
have entered Syria from Turkey over the last two years. The co-operation was at its most 
blatant when in order to reduce the Turkish military guards at a tomb in Syria the Turkish 
military was able to send a convoy into Norther Syria and into the ISIS area to collect 
its personnel without incident. ( There is a useful summary of the evidence for co-operation )

The bombing and international reaction to it may be the 'straw that broke the camels back' 
in making the semi-covert aid Turkey was providing to ISIS unsustainable. It was routine 
for wounded ISIS fighters to cross into Turkey to be patched up and returned to combat. 
But the refusal of the Turkish military to allow a wounded ISIS fighter to cross into 
Turkey yesterday led to a firefight on the border in which at least one Turkish soldier 
was killed. That resulted in Turkish F16s attacking ISIS positions for the first time and 
even more significantly Turkey is now to allow the US to use airbases in Turkey. That's 
quite a shift from quietly treating ISIS wounded so they could return to combat.

However this may turn out to be only a temporary shift to placate NATO. Turkish president 
Erdogan had declared he would stop at nothing to prevent a Kurdish state forming in 
Northern Syria and the mass murder attack in Kobane that killed almost 300 people happened 
shortly after he made that statement. The ISIS killers involved in that attack appear to 
have crossed the border from Turkey. The attack in Suruc may well have seen the 
involvement of MIT, those targeted were asking how the suicide bomber somehow evaded the 
Turkish military searches everyone else entering the area was forced to go through.

Some 5,000 police mounted raids in Istanbul and 13 other districts. The Turkish state has 
presented these to the international media as being mostly directed at ISIS but Kurds on 
Twitter say they were mostly directed against Kurds and leftists and most of the 251 
arrested were not ISIS. 182 were HDP and DBP members and the one person killed in the 
raids was described as "Leftist Gunay Özarslan, who was shot & killed by Turkish police 
during their so-called "anti-ISIS" ops in Istanbul." So even if the Turkish state is 
changing policy and turning against ISIS it is not reducing its greater hostility to the 
Kurds. A point of concern is that the Turkish government said it notified the Syrian Assad 
regime of its airstrikes in advance, if that regime eventually wins the civil war it will 
certainly try and crush the Rojava experiment so Erdogan may be deciding that is the safer 
bet.

In the video of the protest you will hear more details of what happened and what the role 
of the Turkish state has been before the names of 31 of those killed are read out and you 
are told what they were doing in life before it was cut short in Mondays explosion.

WORDS & VIDEO PRODUCTION: Andrew Flood

http://www.wsm.ie/c/dublin-protest-suruc-massacre-turkish-embassy