Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

21 November 2003

TERRORISM

• According to Reuters, a statement purported to come from a unit of the Al Qaeda network said the group had carried out the two suicide car bombings that ripped through Istanbul on Thursday, killing 27 people. The statement by the Abu Hafz al-Masri Brigades--which earlier claimed responsibility for Saturday's bombings of Turkish synagogues--said it had targeted British interests in Turkey to "shatter the peace of Britain... which battles Islam." The statement was reportedly published on an Islamist Web site.

NATO

• According to AFP, NATO said Thursday it has no plans to change the venue of an Alliance summit scheduled in Istanbul next year, after the latest bomb attacks on British interests. “We are not going to be intimidated; the summit continues as planned,” the dispatch quotes a NATO spokesman saying after a NAC meeting and adding: “All of the ambassadors agreed, no change of plans…. That was confirmed.” The New York Daily News writes meanwhile: “Twenty-six months ago, when madmen from afar struck at New York and Washington, NATO rose up to stand in alliance alongside the bloodied United States. As American punishment was visited upon Afghanistan, the NATO nations rallied—their navies patrolling the seas, their air forces flying sorties in the skies. Now it is NATO’s Turkey where blood has been spilled. NATO’s chiefs have formally condemned the Istanbul carnage. But that is hardly a sufficient response. Ankara vowed yesterday that Turkey’s military will be a ‘fist’ in the relentless hunt for the malefactors. Let there be 18 more NATO fists alongside Turkey.”

Thursday’s attacks in Istanbul threw back the media focus on international terrorism.
The New York Times suggests that the attacks on Turkey are aimed at severing a bridge between Islam and the West. According to the daily, the attacks appeared aimed at disrupting the pro-western secular axis many people in the Middle East believe the United States and Britain are trying to drive through the region with the Iraq war. The newspaper observes that such an axis would create a swath of territory friendly to the West from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
“There are three reasons why Turkey in its own right has earned the enmity of the Jihadi fraternity,” says a related Financial Times article, noting: First, it is a U.S. ally, the only Moslem member of NATO. Any American ally would be on the Al Qaeda hit list, but that is doubly true for an Islamic country. Second, Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel is a cause of anger throughout the Arab and Moslem world—and a useful pool of discontent for Al Qaeda to fish in. But third, and more important, “because of its relative success and strenuous efforts to modernize, Moslem Turkey is itself an affront to the Islamo-fascism of the bin Ladenists.”
In a similar vein, Istanbul daily Vatan remarks that Turkey is the most modern part of the Islamic world. “It is intermingled with the West. Its EU membership is under consideration and its secularity has been greatly assimilated. All of these characteristics make Turkey the real and perhaps the only alternative to the interpretation of Islam defended by Al Qaeda,” the daily comments.
The Times insists that the task of tracking down terrorists will need to be pursued with renewed vigor. “It is not a conventional sort of conflict…. It is in many ways an invisible campaign and requires the public to place faith in its leaders and decisions…. But (the campaign) is one that the democratic world has the resources and the will to win,” the newspaper opines.

IRAQ

• In a contribution to the Baltimore Sun, Tom Lantos, the ranking Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee, charges that at a time when the United States and its coalition partners need its help the most in Iraq, “NATO is missing in action.” Lantos writes: “If its members don’t want it to become a mere historical curiosity and a paper army, they have to get serious about NATO becoming a relevant collective security organization ready to respond to today’s challenges. NATO must immediately move to commit forces under its own flag to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq…. NATO needs Iraq as much as Iraq needs NATO. Just as the United States proved itself to be a reliable partner during more than 40 years of confrontation on the European continent, NATO must now prove itself in the streets and countryside of Iraq. Otherwise, NATO will become ever less relevant, and the United States will become even less convinced that this historic alliance will serve as a reliable partner in the future.”