On Saturday night, two bombs exploded at the Besiktas soccer stadium in Istanbul. One bomb was a car bomb that was detonated from a (safe) distance, the other bomb was ignited by a suicide bomber. The Turkish government is convinced that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was behind the attack.
The PKK is a Kurdish Marxist-Leninist revolutionary terrorist organization. Although ISIS could also have carried out yesterday’s attacks, the explosions have “PKK” written all over them because the attacks were directed first and foremost at Turkish police officers, who made up most of the victims. ISIS usually tries to kill as many civilians as possible, not police or soldiers. The PKK, on the other hand, focuses on the latter.
The victims were buried today:
Turkey’s interior minister has given a furious address at a funeral for police officers killed in Saturday night’s bombing attack in Istanbul, slamming Kurdish rebels and their allies in the West.
Minister Suleyman Soylu on Sunday referred to members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, as “animals” after suggesting they were behind the attack that killed 38 people, mostly police, and wounded 155 others.
Earlier today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks, saying:
Israel condemns any terror in Turkey, and Israel expects Turkey to condemn any act of terror in Israel. The battle against terror must be mutual.
Which is, of course, exactly right. The world can use more leaders like Netanyahu. Statesmen like that are, I’m afraid, in short supply.
Although many Westerners have some degree of sympathy for the Kurdish separatist movement, I’m definitely not one of them. The PKK truly is a horrendous organization. They’re basically the Kurdish version of the terrorist groups led by Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara way back when. If these Marxist-Leninist extremists succeed in creating a Kurdistan of their own, the Middle East will soon have its very own version of Cuba or, even worse, North Korea.
There are a lot of good reasons to criticize Turkish President Erdogan’s policies — as I make clear rather often here at PJ Media — but his war on the PKK isn’t one of them. No other country on earth would tolerate the existence of such a vile group of Marxist terrorists. These people are butchers who make life unsafe for everybody in Turkey. As with ISIS, there’s only one way to deal with them: Wipe them completely from the map. Yes, they need to be utterly and completely destroyed so that they can never hurt anyone else, ever again.
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