From France to Siirt, different faces of globalizing terror

The DAEŞ terrorist organization, with the terror attack it carried out in the French city of Nice, once again caused dozens of innocent people to lose their lives and hundreds to be wounded. This year France has faced a large-scale terror attack of this magnitude for the second time. Only last month a terror attack was also carried out in Brussels. Let us also recall the terror acts carried out in Istanbul and Ankara in May-June and before.

The terror attack carried out in the last days of Ramadan in Saudi Arabia, moreover among innocent, unarmed people at worship, in fact laid the matter bare once again in all its nakedness: The terror threat today has globalized in an alarming way and has no ethnic or religious quality. The matter needs to be discussed as a phenomenon, not in the context of any religion or ethnicity, and the stance needs to be taken accordingly.

Fighting terrorism is, above all, a matter of principles and of a view of life. When concessions are made on principles for one reason or another, and when double-faced policies are followed, success in this fight becomes difficult; in regions such as Africa, where fragility is high and the number of failed states is large, terror is even becoming institutionalized and ordinary.

While terror acts are carried out in many geographies from Africa to South Asia and, in one respect, terror is becoming routine, the psychology that terror creates brings with it a reactivity far beyond unease, and at times discourses and practices that reach racism and fascism.

The rising Islamophobia and racism in Europe and the US are the clearest indication of this situation. In particular DAEŞ has a mission in these geographies of providing legitimacy to Islamophobia and racism. It stirs up feelings of hatred among peoples.

Today in France, the National Front Party, led by Marine Le Pen, whom we can call far-right and even racist, came out first in the 2014 European Parliament elections and managed to send 23 representatives to the European Parliament. Le Pen's fascistic approaches toward immigrants and especially Muslims, and the fact that these approaches find a response among the French people, lay bare the gravity of the situation.

The attack carried out in France once again showed the necessity of taking a common and principled stance against terror. In the fight against terror, an assessment that does not add terror as a phenomenon, and the sources of this terror, alongside the fight against organizations can be misleading. For example, looking at which countries export the greater part of the equipment and weapons used in terror acts carried out today in various countries of the world could be illuminating for understanding the subject.

Moreover, when one looks at the countries where these weapons are used, the situation looks even more striking. In Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, Chad, in countries where people live below the hunger line, with no food or vaccines, we should think about who supplied and financed the thousands of dollars' worth of weapons in people's hands, the arsenal spent in a single day on water weapons. Do we not know that none of these weapons, not a single bullet fired from these weapons, is produced in these countries?

In fact, unless terrorist organizations receive support from certain countries, it is not possible for them to expand their sphere of influence this much. This points to the existence of other countries or structures, like Assad, that support and finance terror for certain interests. At this point it is not possible to say that the records of Western countries are clean.

Some truths lose their effect on public opinion over time because they are voiced too much, but this does not change their quality as truth. Supporting any terrorist organization to obtain small interests on certain matters, or supporting any terrorist organization because it is fighting, or appears to be fighting, another terrorist organization, does not diminish or solve the scale of the problem. On the contrary, it deepens it.

The terror attack carried out in France showed once again the necessity of dwelling more on this issue and determining a common stance. Moreover, the latest developments are important in showing that the nature of terror has changed.

In the classical literature, terrorism tends to be treated as an elite discontent. Today's developments show that terrorism has turned into a tendency toward massification and politicization. This is important for understanding how great a threat and risk global peace and stability are under.

New strategies need to be developed in the fight against terror. The most important among them are the development of fast and functional cooperation mechanisms and the reconsideration of their strategies by international organizations within this framework. Terror can be fought only with a new and "no ifs, no buts" strategy.

PIT TERROR IN SİİRT

Meanwhile, even though the PKK is drifting further from the people day by day with its tactics of digging pits and spreading terror to the cities and has earned the hatred of the Kurdish people, it has made an attempt to spread this terror to Siirt as well, where it has found no foothold from the very beginning. The fire they opened on a police station in the middle of the night hit an innocent child and his mother who were asleep on a rooftop, unaware of anything. The child lost his life, and the mother's struggle for life continues. When even the organization's senior executives have self-criticized the pit policy as a great mistake, it is not hard to guess the meaning of another suicide on top of this failure and suicide. There seems to be an archaic calculation involved of taking as many people as possible with them as they sink. Or, in order to settle accounts one last time before dying, this act has no meaning other than inflicting maximum harm on the Kurdish people in revenge on the Kurdish people who, from the beginning, did not reward or support their pit terror. If you ask about this act's propaganda value, there is none. If you ask about its chance of success, there is none. If you ask about any chance of achieving a gain for the Kurdish people or for the organization, there is none either. The only emotion that could direct this act, which has no rationality whatsoever, is revenge on the Kurds who have been declared traitors for not supporting them. A desperation that has accepted the risk even if this revenge will cost them their own lives. May there be plenty of this desperation.