Suicide bombings in Istanbul have put the focus on a sinister terror group, the Kurdish Hizbullah, writes Nicholas Birch
Nobody knows yet where Gokhan Elaltuntas (22) and Mesut Cabuk (29) were as cold, clear morning dawned on Istanbul last Saturday. Nobody will ever know what they were thinking as they drove their two Isuzu pick-up trucks, packed with 400 kilograms of fertiliser bombs disguised as boxes of washing-up powder, through the narrow streets of the city.
All that the shocked inhabitants of this city of 15 million built on the fault line between Europe and Asia know now is that both of them died between 9.25 a.m. and 9.30 a.m., their bodies obliterated by the force of the blasts they had triggered in front of two synagogues. They took 23 people with them, six from among Turkey's small Jewish community.
Istanbul has since had another unprecedented atrocity to deal with - the double suicide attacks on the British consulate and HSBC bank on Thursday, two apparently more powerful bombings which so far are known to have killed 27 people and wounded nearly 500. Yet, while reporting has been hampered by a court decision on Thursday prohibiting publication of unofficial information on the latest attacks, the Turkish newspapers this week have been full of details about the synagogue bombers and their two suspected accomplices, Azad Ekinci and Feridun Ugurlu, thought to have provided the trucks used in the bombings. And yesterday's Hurriyet newspaper claimed Ekinci and Ugurlu were the suicide bombers behind Thursday's attacks.
For a country desperate to understand how four of its citizens had been seduced by the bloody world of Islamic terror, the coverage provides a grim insight into the shady links between Turkish religious fanatics and their international fellows. Above all it tells the story of a childhood friendship that veered off into mass murder.
The starting point for the story is the impoverished south-east Turkish town of Bingol, where Elaltuntas, Cabuk, Ekinci and Ugurlu were born between 1973 and 1981.
Bingol is notorious as one of the strongholds of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, whose war against the state largely petered out in 1999. Since 2000, though, Turkish terrorist experts say, this town of 200,000 people has also been the headquarters of another, far more sinister organisation, the Islamic extremist Hizbullah.
Unrelated to the Palestinian group of the same name, Kurdish Hizbullah came to the Turkish public's attention in 2000, following the police shooting of its chief, Huseyin Velioglu. Interrogation of two of his followers led to the discovery of video tapes documenting the torture and execution of scores of people, mostly religious-minded businessmen believed to have fallen out with the organisation.
"The last 20 years in Turkey have been bloody, but Turks had never seen anything nearly as gruesome as this," says Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish reporter who has been following Hizbullah closely for years. "I was in the US when the news began to break, but I remember my friends telling me that what they saw on the news was so horrible that they didn't have the stomach to eat anything afterwards."
Immediately after its foundation in the early 1980s, Hizbullah set about snuffing out rival religious groups in the Kurdish region. After the start of the separatist war in 1984, it rapidly turned its guns on the PKK. Still unsolved, the deaths of a thousand suspected PKK sympathisers, human rights workers and journalists, most shot to death in broad daylight in the cities of the south-east, are thought to be its handiwork.
What links this with Saturday's bombers is the news, published by daily Sabah this week, that Azad Ekinci is known to have been a Hizbullah member between 1990 and 1993. According to another newspaper, Hurriyet, Gokhan Elaltuntas may also have been a member. "Elaltuntas's cousin Ramazan is currently on trial for the Hizbullah murders of 60 people in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir," the newspaper said, adding that another cousin, Giyasettin, was also on trial on suspicions of involvement in killings in Bingol.
Elaltuntas's friend, Adil Omac, denies the links. "He was a devout kid, but never a member of an extremist organisation," he told Hurriyet. But he admitted that Elaltuntas had changed after 2002, when he and his father opened an internet café in Bingol. "He was working with Azad Ekinci and his brother Metin there," Omac said. "He shaved off his Islamist beard and got much quieter." With the news that another Turkish extremist group, the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front (IBDA/C), had claimed responsibility for the four Istanbul attacks, terrorism experts are as yet unwilling to point the finger directly at Hizbullah. But they have their suspicions.
"Like other extremist groups, Hizbullah has been severely weakened by mass arrests in the past five years," says Bulent Orakoglu, a former chief of police intelligence. "The difference is that, while other groups have almost entirely disappeared, Hizbullah is still out there. It is far more likely to have had a hand in these attacks than anybody else." Journalist Rusen Cakir has been writing about Islamic extremism in Turkey for more than 15 n years. For him IBDA/C claims of responsibility for the bombings are nonsense. "This is a tiny, marginal movement wholly incapable of organising such huge, synchronised attacks," he says. "They have a history of trying to bolster their reputation by appropriating other people's work.
"Hizbullah is far more likely to have provided the members of this new terrorist group," he adds. "But it seems clear that what we're looking at here is something totally new - not a large-scale organisation based only in Turkey, but a much smaller Turkish group with links to the outside. This is what makes it so worrying." Again Ekinci, who comes across in the media reports as the most educated of the four men, and probably the group's leader, is the key.
"He and Mesut were childhood friends," a member of Cabuk's family told Hurriyet. "At school they were in the same class, and inseparable." By all accounts, the friendship lasted far longer than that. According to police sources quoted in Hurriyet, the two men travelled through Iran to Afghanistan together in the early 1990s.
"Azad also told us that he had been educated at religious schools in Pakistan between 1997 and 1999," anonymous friends of Ekinci told Sabah.
"If poor Turks set off for Afghanistan via Pakistan, that means only one thing - al-Qaeda," says Ankara-based terrorism expert Umit Ozdag, pointing out that this is the first time Turkish religious extremists have been involved in suicide attacks. "For the past decade, there have been rich pickings for bin Laden's organisation in Pakistani mosques and religious schools." Rusen Cakir says several hundred Turks are known to have fought in Afghanistan. Far more - Ekinci among them - joined the wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, two regions with close cultural and historical links with Turkey.
But Cakir thinks the al-Qaeda tag bandied about by commentators and politicians in Turkey and outside is too easy.
"Al-Qaeda is not like an office building you go to in the morning," he says.
"It's a loose confederation of like-minded people, a spider's web of vaguely-linked organisations. This could be al-Qaeda. Then again, it might not be." Sami Nader, a Middle East expert at the Centre for International Studies and Research in Paris, agrees. "This is more complex than al-Qaeda," he says. "The \ network has increased dramatically in size.
"Al-Qaeda has become like a brand name, appropriated by other groups seeking a reflection of its prestige," adds Nader.
"It's too early to point fingers abroad," says former intelligence chief Bulent Orakoglu, "but I have no doubt that the bombers were just the Turkish finger attached to an international body." There are traces in Turkish news reports to back this up. Friends of Feridun Ugurlu told reporters from Sabah that "a man speaking Arabic" had been to his Istanbul flat frequently over the past few months. "Every time he came in, Feridun would take him into his room and close the door. We couldn't understand what they were saying." According to the statements of neighbours, Ugurlu, like Elaltuntas, seemed to have changed recently. "He shaved off his beard and started going around in flowing robes, like a cleric," said one.
The slow drip-drip of information about these four men's lives is sure to intensify already-heated debates in this country riven by tensions between a hard-line secular establishment and a government which traces its roots to political Islam. After a year spent sharpening their pens, secularist commentators have leapt on the attacks as proof that election victory for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) last November had opened the door to Islamist terror.
Ultimately, Rusen Cakir thinks, the attacks may point not to the final victory of political Islam in Turkey, but the death throes of its radical fringes. "There are not nearly as many real radicals in Turkey today as there were 20 years ago," he says. "The vast majority have been incorporated into the far more moderate Islamic political parties that have grown up since 1980.
"In a sense, the moderation shown by the present government is an expression of the failure of Islamist ideology in Turkey," he adds. "They have remained pro-US and pro-Israeli, and that's an insult to the extremists."