Turkey: The choice of targets, the timing and the co-ordination of the suicide bombings in Istanbul left no one in doubt yesterday: this was the work of al-Qaeda, write Owen Bowcott and Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
To strike British interests during President Bush's state visit to London, five days after two synagogues in the Turkish metropolis were devastated, implies a vision of global conflict far broader than the national campaigns waged by any single terror group.
Those who assembled the truck bomb and blew their bodies apart may have been Turks, but they were sub-contractors for a larger purpose. The guiding intelligence was probably thousands of miles away hidden in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The pattern of al-Qaeda attacks since September 11th, 2001, has been consistent. Local radical Islamists, trained in the Taliban-sanctioned camps run by Osama bin Laden or volunteers in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya, have forged international links.
For those militants, the sufferings of Palestinians in Israel, the crushing of Chechen independence and the US-led invasion of Iraq have fused their campaigns into common resentment of "Western aggressors" and defence of Islamic "territory".
A combined claim of responsibility was telephoned to Turkey's semi-official Anatolia news agency by a man who said the latest bombings were the work of al- Qaeda and the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front, or IBDA-C. Both groups had already said independently that they carried out Saturday's attack on two synagogues in which 23 people died.
Istanbul, one of the world's largest cities with a population of more than 10 million, finds itself in the frontline of the war on terrorism. Home to millions of displaced rural Turks and Kurds, the city has had a more recent influx of defeated Chechen rebels.
Turkey, a long-standing NATO ally, eager applicant for EU membership, close military ally of Israel and secular Muslim democracy had, extraordinarily, managed to avoid most of the diplomatic repercussions of the war on terror and Iraq - until now.
The Turkish state has for decades involved the awkward co- existence of a dominant military council and successive political coalitions wedded to the ideological legacy of its founding father, Kemal Ataturk. Last year, frustrated by the slow pace of change, the Turkish people handed a landslide victory to the Justice and Development party (AKP), which has its political roots in moderate Islam.
Two men who killed themselves in Saturday's attacks were named this week. That Mesut Cabuk and Gokhan Elaltuntas were Turks was a significant embarrassment for a country which prides itself on a tradition of moderate Islam.
Cabuk, Elaltuntas and two suspected accomplices, Azad Ekinci and Feridun Ugurlu, were born in the Kurdish town of Bingol in south-east Turkey. Ekinci, Ugurlu and Cabuk are thought to have received training in Pakistan.
Bingol, a stronghold of the separatist Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), has also been a centre of activity for the PKK's arch-enemy, Turkish Hizbullah. Ekinci is thought to have been a Hizbullah member between 1990 and 1993.
Once accused of doing the Turkish state's dirty work, Hizbullah, whose members are Sunnis, is thought to be responsible for the early 1990s disappearances of hundreds of Kurdish human rights workers, journalists and leftists.
A military crackdown was thought to have dealt it a knockout blow. Opposition politicians, however, have criticised the AKP government for releasing about 130 Hizbullah militants since it came to power.
What role the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front, a similar militant group which has targeted Christian sites in Istanbul, played in the latest attacks remains unclear. Turkish terrorism experts are, however, convinced the suicide bombers were working as sub-contractors for al-Qaeda. - (Guardian service)