London Bridge and Borough Market Terror Attacks

The United Kingdom is facing the brunt of jihadi terrorism. Instead of being in denial, the government needs to introduce radical measures which may not be entirely in consonance with Western values of freedom and rule of law.

(Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4570082/SAS-Blue-Thunder-unit-lands-helicopter-London-Bridge.html)

Attackers drove a van at high speed into pedestrians on London Bridge before going on a stabbing spree in the nearby Borough Market area on Saturday 3^rd June 2017 at about 2210 hrs in what British authorities described as terrorist incidents. The attack lasted only about eight minutes before which the jihadis were neutralized. Authorities urged the people on Twitter to “run, hide, tell” if they were caught in an attack. Latest reports suggested that about seven people were killed and several injured and three attackers were also shot dead by the police.

The attacks come days ahead of a June 8 election and less than two weeks after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at a pop concert by U.S. singer Ariana Grande in Manchester in northern England. Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility, it does not require a rocket scientist to determine who the attackers were.

The BBC showed a photograph of two possible London attackers shot by police, one of whom had canisters strapped to his body.

A Reuters reporter said some time after the attack began that he had heard loud bangs near the Borough Market area.

Witnesses described a white van veering into pedestrians near London Bridge and knocking over several people.

“A van came from London Bridge itself, went between the traffic light system and rammed it towards the steps,” a taxi driver told the BBC. “It knocked loads of people down.

“Then three men got out with hunting knives, 12 inches long and shouting "this is for Allah" went randomly along Borough High Street stabbing people at random.”

Islamic State earlier on Saturday sent out a call on instant messaging service Telegram urging its followers to launch attacks with trucks, knives and guns against “Crusaders” during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

An elite Special Air Service - SAS - unit nick named 'Blue Thunder' is believed to have landed on London Bridge following the attack. Blue Thunder, who act on orders from the Home Secretary, are a 70-man strong unit formed after the 2015 Paris attacks and trained in tackling domestic terror scenarios.

Blue Thunder’s name comes from the unmarked blue Eurocopter Dauphin helicopter in which they travel. Photographs appeared to capture two of the aircraft landing on London Bridge shortly after the vehicle and stabbing rampage.

The civilian style helicopter is used to transport Special Forces troops around the country quickly and covertly. 

Similar attacks, in Berlin, Nice, Brussels and Paris, have been carried out by militants over the past couple of years.

“Following updates from police and security officials, I can confirm that the terrible incident in London is being treated as a potential act of terrorism,” Prime Minister Theresa May said.

London’s river Thames police said it was working with the lifeboat rescue service to help evacuate people caught up in the attack, described by police as a terrorist incident.

U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to offer U.S. help to Britain. The White House said he had been briefed on the incidents by his national security team.

One woman told Reuters she saw what appeared to be three people with knife wounds and possibly their throats cut at London Bridge at the Thames river. Reuters was unable to immediately verify her account.

STABBINGS ON THE STREET

Police said they fired shots after reports of stabbings in the nearby Borough Market area. They also responded to an incident in the Vauxhall area further west, but later said it was unconnected to the van and knife attacks.

Streets around London Bridge and Borough Market, fashionable districts packed with bars and restaurants, would have been busy with people on a Saturday night out. BBC showed dozens of people, evidently caught up in the attack, being escorted through a police cordon with their hands on their heads.

BBC radio said witnesses saw people throwing tables and chairs at the perpetrators of the attack to protect themselves.

According to one witness, she saw a speeding white van veering into pedestrians at London Bridge. That witness told the BBC that the van hit five to six people. Reuters television footage showed dozens of emergency vehicles in the area around London Bridge. There were unconfirmed reports that it was a B&Q and Hertz van.

The incident bore similarities to a March 2017 attack on Westminster Bridge, west of London Bridge, in which a Muslim man Khalid Masood killed five people after driving into a crowd of pedestrians before stabbing a police officer in the grounds of Parliament.

Instead of being in denial, the government needs to introduce radical measures which may not be entirely democratic. These measures may include but may not be limited to deporting hate preachers, closing down places of worship where radicalism is fostered, curbing entry of so-called refugees/migrants and eliminating jihadis who have participated in the conflict in Syria/Iraq and returned to the UK. It is better to eliminate the terrorists before they cause mayhem than after carnage has taken place as it happened in the Borough market.

Westminster 22/3

In 2016, it was Brussels 22/3 and one year later it is Westminster 22/3. A terror attack in the heart of London left five dead and nearly 40 injured

The London terror attack is a developing story and is reminiscent of the 2001 Indian Parliament attack though on a relatively lesser scale. The incident has taken place on the first anniversary of the Brussels attacks carried out by by Islamist militants that killed 32 people.

An assailant believed to be an Islamist (owing allegiance to ISIS) stabbed a policeman and was shot by police just outside Britain's parliament building in London on 22nd March around 2.40 pm in what police described as a "terrorist incident." It was later announced that the policeman Keith Palmer, 48 succumbed to his injuries.  It was reported earlier that two people died in the incident, according to Sky News, but the total number of casualties was unclear. Later it was reported that five persons including the police officer and the assailant were among those dead and around 40 were injured.

Amid confusing scenes, it appeared the incident may have unfolded in several locations, including on the nearby Westminster Bridge where eyewitnesses said a car had crashed into pedestrians. A 4x4 vehicle ploughed into the railings near Westminster Hall after mowing down pedestrians on the bridge.

Source: NYT Terrain and aerial imagery by Google

The yellow arrow indicates the route taken by the terrorist on Westminster bridge; the two yellow circles are the places where the car crashed and where the assailant was shot and the red spots show where the pedestrians were wounded.

Reuters’ reporters inside the parliament building heard loud bangs and shortly afterwards saw two people lying on the ground in a courtyard just outside, within the perimeter of the parliamentary estate.

A Reuters’ photographer said he saw at least a dozen people injured on Westminster Bridge, next to parliament.

His photographs showed people lying on the ground, some of them bleeding heavily and one apparently under a bus.

Witness reports suggested the assailant and the stabbed policeman were the people seen lying on the ground just outside the parliamentary building by Reuters reporters.

The House of Commons, which was in session at the time, was immediately suspended and lawmakers were asked to stay inside.

Prime Minister Theresa May was safe after the incident, a spokesman for her office said. He declined to say where May was when the attack took place.

Journalist Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail newspaper told LBC radio that he had witnessed the stabbing of the policeman and the shooting of the assailant from his office in the parliament building.

"He (the assailant) ran in through the open gates ... He set about one of the policemen with what looked like a stick," Letts said. Letts, said he saw a man in black attack a police officer outside Parliament before being shot two or three times as he tried to storm into the House of Commons, the Press Association reports.

"The policeman (Keith Palmer) fell over on the ground and it was quite horrible to watch and then having done that, he disengaged and ran towards the House of Commons entrance used by MPs (members of parliament) and got about 20 yards or so when two plain-clothed guys with guns shot him." He added: “As this attacker was running towards the entrance two plain clothed guys with guns shouted at him, what appeared like a warning, he ignored it and they shot him two or three times and he fell.” 

Reuters’ reporters inside parliament saw a large number of armed police, some carrying shields, pouring into the building.

In Edinburgh, the Scottish parliament suspended a planned debate and vote on independence as news of events in London came in.

Britain is on its second-highest alert level of "severe" meaning an attack by militants is considered highly likely.

The identity of the suspected Islamist militant has not been released by the London Police for reasons best known. It is rather stupid on part of the authorities to suppress the identity merely because of suspected ISIS links. Suppression of essential information leads to speculative reporting. The attacker was briefly identified by Channel 4 News as a prominent British-born Islamist extremist but the broadcaster later reversed its report after other journalists disputed it on Twitter. BBC Pakistan correspondent Secunder Kernani said a “reliable source” told him that the man Channel 4 named was in jail.

The Islamist link was apparent from the choice of weapons, namely using a vehicle to plough into a crowd as in Nice and Berlin and a knife for stabbing which has been used in the past by Islamist terrorists in Israel and elsewhere. The ISIS link is further reinforced by the choice of the target, namely, the heart of democracy, the British Parliament and a street with a lot of pedestrians. ISIS, the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba choose high value targets and public places frequented by a lot of people at any given point of time.

The police again had no business to refer to the attack as a "Lone Wolf Attack" or that only a lone attacker was involved in the absence of detailed investigations.

In May 2013, two British Islamists stabbed to death soldier Lee Rigby on a street in southeast London.

In July 2005, four British Islamists killed 52 commuters and themselves in suicide bombings on the British capital's transport system in what was London's worst peacetime attack.

Update: The identity of the assailant was released by the authorities. The name of the assailant is Khalid Masood, 52 from West Midlands who had a  criminal record but was not considered as a terror threat. According to sources, the terrorist was killed by the protection officers of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon.

Update 25th March: According to security officials, the terrorist Khalid Masood was not a “lone wolf” and others had played a key part in indoctrinating him and helping him to carry out the deadly attacks in Westminster on 22^nd March.

The disclosure that the British-born Muslim convert was likely to have been part of a wider conspiracy came as armed police detained 11 people in raids across the country with two of the arrests, including that of a woman, Rohey Hydara, a Gambian woman with whom he was living, described as “significant” in the investigation.

Terror Attacks in Brussels - A Deep-rooted Malaise

Four days after one of Europe’s most wanted terror suspects - Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving terrorist of the November 13 attacks in Paris - was captured in a joint French-Belgian police operation in Brussels, multiple bomb attacks left the Belgian capital reeling.

 Two blasts, minutes apart, tore through the departures area of Zaventem airport — the main Brussels airport — shortly after 8 a.m. local time. 

 Within an hour, an explosion hit a train near Maalbeek metro station, close to the EU institutions and around 350 meters from where European leaders hold their summits. 

 Belgian authorities confirmed one explosion at the airport was caused by a suicide bomber. A second was caused by a bomb detonated from a distance.

Two blasts targeted the main hall of Zaventem Airport at around 8:00am (0700 GMT), with prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw saying the assault likely involved at least one suicide bomber. 

A third hit Maalbeek metro station near the European Union's main buildings, just as commuters were making their way to work in rush hour.

"A man shouted a few words in Arabic and then I heard a huge blast," airport baggage security officer Alphonse Lyoura told AFP, his hands bloodied.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday's attacks, and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said there was no immediate evidence linking key Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam to them. After his arrest Abdeslam told authorities that he had created a new network and was planning new attacks.

The capture of Abdeslam in Belgium was hailed as a breakthrough in the police investigation into the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. However, there was no let up in the hunt for other accomplices of Abdeslam who were identified as Mohamed Abrini, a 30-year-old of Moroccan origin and 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui who had travelled to Syria in 2013. According to investigators, Laachraoui had been using the false name of Soufiane Kayal - the name with which he rented an apartment in Auvelais in Belgium and from where the terror attacks were planned. Laachraoui also went under the same false name when he crossed the border between Austria and Hungary on September 9th when he was travelling with Abdeslam and Mohamed Belkaïd, a third terror suspect who was killed in a shoot-out with police in Belgium last Tuesday.

There is bewilderment about the choice of Belgium as a target of ISIS latest attack. Apart from the fact it houses the headquarters of NATO and EU it is not a frontline military power; on the contrary it is the logistical hub of the Islamic State and serves as a launch pad from where IS could carry out its strikes throughout the European continent. While it may not be possible to know why IS targeted Brussels the following factors made Brussels vulnerable to a terror strike.

Belgium’s Complex Polity

 

Belgium has the trappings of western political structures, but in practice those structures are defective and have long been so. The academics Kris Deschouwer and Lieven De Winter gave an authoritative account of the development of political corruption and clientelism in an essay published in 1998. Almost from the beginning, they explain, the state suffered problems of political legitimacy.

Belgium came late, by western European standards, to statehood. In Belgium there were already existing allegiances to the locality, and although Belgium’s liberal elite threw off Dutch rule in 1830, it could neither uproot nor supplant these attachments to the local community, often intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church. So the formal structure of a Belgian state was erected but framing within it the cultural, social and welfare structures of the Church’s state within a state. Ranged against the Christian Democrats and the socialists were the anti-clerical and middle-class liberals, who constituted the third corner in Belgium’s political triangle. They did not have the same popular support, or the equivalent social structures. That was followed in due course by the development of a socialist/labor movement with its rival structures for mutual assurance, cultural associations. Ranged against the Christian Democrats and the socialists were the anti-clerical and middle-class liberals, who constituted the third corner in Belgium’s political triangle. They did not have the same popular support, or the equivalent social structures.

Eventually, the formal state developed its own services in areas like education, health care and other expressions of a welfare state, but it was obliged to do so respecting (and indeed using) the structures of the political parties. 

Administrations were divided by their political allegiances. Politicians were masters of patronage, with jobs and money at their disposal, and, as a consequence, public service suffered.

Although attempts at reforms were made, in many cases those reforms were not deep-rooted, but involved formalizing the division of spoils, for instance, to allocate control of certain jobs between different political parties.

Belgium’s unique geographical and linguistic status

Belgium is a small country of about11 million people which is divided by language and culture. Slightly more than half of Belgium's population is Flemish. They speak Dutch and live in the north, in Flanders. Less than half are French and live in the southern region of Wallonia. The framework of the Belgium government and the fact that the country's security and intelligence agencies are divided internally makes it relatively easier for these kinds of attacks to happen.

The country at every level and almost every public service -- schools, hospitals, even policing -- is split along linguistic lines. There are French schools and Flemish schools, French hospitals and Flemish hospitals.

Brussels is the capital of Belgium and Flanders, but Brussels is French-speaking.

Lack of intelligence sharing and poor co-ordination internally and within the EU

At least one of the attackers Brahim (or Ibrahim) el-Bakroui was deported by Turkey to the Netherlands in 2015 with a clear indication that he was a jihadist. Yet no action seems to have been taken either by the Dutch or the Belgian authorities. There have been repeated calls for a pan-European intelligence agency that would effectively share information from different countries. Members of the European Parliament denounced, again, the lack of coordination.

According to experts, even within states, intelligence-gathering agencies – France alone has 33 of them – have trouble cooperating. 

"Is it not in the nature of intelligence agencies to keep the information for themselves?" asked Jean-Marie Delarue, who until recently headed the French agency that reviews surveillance requests from these intelligence services.

"Information is power," Delarue said in a recent interview. "In intelligence, one only has enemies, no friends."

Cross-border cooperation would probably have helped prevent Tuesday's attacks.

Europe has had a "counter-terrorism coordinator" for much of the last 10 years, but this fact-finding institution was dismissed as "weak" in a recent French parliamentary report and as "having no operational capacity to offer."

In the absence of an effective centralized European counter-terrorism agency, it is up to the member states to cooperate with one another. Yet they do so only haphazardly.

There are plenty of databases, for instance, but the information they contain is either incomplete or inaccessible, numerous officials complained.

A fundamental one that contains criminal suspects' surveillance records — the Schengen Information System, or SIS — is only weakly supported by most of the member countries. The French parliamentary report last month said the French internal intelligence agency "is the only one that regularly feeds this database" and criticized "the very spotty nature of the information furnished by" other European nations.

"There is nothing automatic about what goes into the SIS," said Francois Heisbourg, a French intelligence expert. He said a decade of European squabbling over the issue had still not resulted in the creation of a minimal tool, the Passenger Name Record, of airplane travelers.

It is not just the main SIS database that is woefully lacking.

Some 5,000 EU citizens are known to have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State and other groups. Yet the Europol database "contains only 2,786 verified foreign terrorist fighters entered by EU member states," the counter-terrorism coordinator pointed out in a recent report.

"I think the biggest problem lies in the different levels of professionalism among the security services in Europe," according to Guido Steinberg, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

The French parliamentary report ruefully acknowledged, without citing a specific assault, systematic "gaps in the transmission of information, which, if they had been realized in time, could have forestalled the attack" in Paris.

The cross-border cooperation failures in the case of the November Paris attacks are a telling case study. Belgium was unable to apprehend Salah Abdeslam, the Belgian-born French citizen of Moroccan descent, one of the key plotters of the Paris attacks swiftly considering the fact that he was stopped the morning after the attack near the Belgian border but was not detained. 

Geographical proximity

 

Brussels' proximity to major European cities and historic lack of internal cohesion makes it simpler for jihadists to move about without much impediment. Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is just a short drive away from a host of major cities: Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Berlin can be reached within a matter of few hours by road or rail.

Belgium’s  Jihadi link
 

Many extremists in Belgium have been inspired by the once-powerful radical group Sharia4Belgium, which targeted vulnerable and disenfranchised communities marred by rampant crime and unemployment.

The group gained prominence in 2010 and was disbanded five years later after a trial that resulted in its designation as a terror organization. [Sharia4Belgium was a Belgian radical Salafist organisation which called for Belgium to convert itself into an Islamist state. In February 2015 the group was designated a terrorist organization by a Belgian judge, and its spokesman, Fouad Belkacem, was sentenced to 12 years in prison].

Today, Belgium has the highest per capita of foreign fighters of any Western European country. Of the 5000-6000 Europeans who fought in Syria up to 550 are reportedly Belgian nationals. 

Over the last two years there had been a Molenbeek link to almost all the terrorist incidents in Europe including the May 2014 shooting by Mehdi Nemmouche at the Jewish museum in Brussels, Charlie Hebdo attack (January 2015), the failed attack by Ayoub el-Khazzani in August 2015 on a Thalys train. Salah Abdeslam, one of the key plotters of the Paris attack was arrested from Molenbeek a few days ago. Thus all the perpetrators of the myriad terror attacks had ties to Molenbeek.  

The inability of Belgian security services to control the flow of fighters traveling to Syria/Iraq to fight alongside IS, and -- perhaps more worryingly -- their failure to track them on return, only indicates that many jihadists have gone unnoticed. Authorities in several neighboring countries believe other attacks are likely. The European Union needs to have re-look at the migration policy and Schengen regime and to have in place an intelligence coordination committee for dissemination of intelligence inputs to thwart attacks in future.

Turkey in the Crosshairs

The Obama Administration has often emphasised the critical importance of Turkey's role and participation in the anti-Islamic State coalition. A special presidential envoy for the coalition said that the US cannot succeed against the Daesh/Islamic State without Turkey. Is the Obama Administration naive? Or does it wilfully ignore Turkey's IS links?

Nearly a fortnight prior to the Paris attacks, the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the downing of a Russian commercial plane carrying tourists from the Egyptian sea side resort of Shram-al Shaikh to St. Petersburg while it was flying over the Sinai. Russia had vowed to bring to justice the perpetrators responsible for the terrorist act. The November 13 Paris attacks not only brought about a unity amongst the members of the European Union but Russia too expressed solidarity with France in its fight against the IS. While Russian solidarity was welcome, its participation militarily was worrisome for some of the coalition members, essentially because it has been its stated objective to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad. (Russian intervention had begun in September 2015 in response to a request by the Syrian regime).  

On 17 November 2015, in the wake of the attack on the Russian commercial jet over the Sinai and the Paris attacks, according to the Russian defence minister′s public report to the president of Russia Vladimir Putin, Russia employed TU-160, TU-95 MSM and TU-22M3 long range strategic bombers to hit what he claimed were the IS targets in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor as well as targets in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib.

Downing the SU-24 and its Consequences

In the course of its anti-IS operations, a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bomber was shot down by F-16 fighters belonging to the Turkish Air Force  on 24 November 2015.  According to Turkey’s claims presented to the UN Security council, two planes, whose nationalities were unknown to them at the time, violated Turkish airspace over the Yayladaği province up to 1.36 miles for 17 seconds. The planes were given 10 warnings within the span of 5 minutes to change their course. According to Turkey, the planes disregarded the warnings and were subsequently fired upon by Turkish F-16s patrolling the area. After the Turkish fire, one of the planes left Turkish airspace and the other crashed into Syrian territory. The Russian Ministry of Defense denied that any of their planes had violated Turkey's airspace, claiming they had been flying south of the Yayladaği province.

This incident led to escalation of tensions between the Russians and Turkey and the North Atlantic Alliance of which Turkey is a member. According to Group Captain (Retd) PI Muralidharan the interception by the F-16s were pre-meditated. He explains: "From the track chart that has been shared with the media by Turkish Foreign Ministry it is clear that the engagement by the F-16 was premeditated. The Russian SU-24 hardly transgressed about 10 kilometres of Turkish airspace in a linear fashion. At the combat speeds that fighters fly, this would have given at the most 20-25 seconds (at 6 kilometres, which is the reported altitude of the SU-24). This would be far too short a time for the entire intercept drill to be executed. Furthermore, if missile flight time is included, this timeframe would shrink further to just approximately 15 seconds. Can an ideal air defence intercept take place in this compressed timeframe? No, it cannot. Even if the entire identification process preceded the missile launch, clearly the Turkish F-16 pilot must have been pre-positioned by his controlling radar or Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) in a vantageous position relative to the SU-24, shooting it as soon as it crossed the border, theoretically that is." 

What caused particular chagrin in Moscow was Ankara’s determination to say from the outset that it deliberately shot down the plane instead of going for a face-saving explanation. Since then, Ankara has taken a largely defiant posture towards Russia. That Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan boasted he himself gave the order to fire only made things worse. While subsequently President Erdoğan has expressed regret and said that he was “truly saddened” by the downing, he refused to issue an apology as demanded of him by Moscow. On the contrary, he has said that those who violate Turkish airspace should be the ones to apologise.

The Russian military, in response to the downing of their aircraft deployed its advanced S-400 air defense missile system to the Syrian airbase of Hmeimim (Latakia province), only 18 miles from the Turkish border. This is a military game changer, with a senior Israeli officer describing its deployment as his country’s “worst nightmare.” With a radius of 250 miles and the ability to target up to 36 aircraft or cruise missiles simultaneously, Russia now possesses the capability to take down a Turkish plane any time it wishes. It also eliminates the possibility that the West could establish a no-fly zone over northern Syria — a step long demanded by Ankara. Putin also ordered Russian air-to-air fighter jets to accompany its bombers on all flights over Syrian airspace thereby enabling Russia to shoot down a Turkish jet on the Turkish-Syrian border, and then assert, after the fact, that it was close to attacking a Russian plane. 

At the heart of this incident lies the fundamental difference between Russia and Turkey over Assad. Russia supports Assad’s regime while Turkey is one of Assad’s staunchest opponents. The downing of the SU-24 was nothing less than the ongoing proxy war between Russia and Turkey for a moment becoming a hot one. Beyond the emotions, it serves Kremlin’s strategic objectives in Syria to take an unforgiving line against Turkey as it puts pressure on Turkey to step back from supporting anti-Assad rebels.

Turkey's flawed foreign policy

 

The neo-Ottoman aspirations of incumbent Turkish President Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), given its recent improved showing in the presidential polls, have been the guiding force in Ankara’s foreign policy. Its Syrian policy has been tumultuous ranging from cultivating Assad in the mid-2000s to seeking his removal in 2011 when the Syrian uprising began. Turkey had appealed to the US to intervene in Syria and to oust Assad. However, Obama, who had no intention of deploying forces in the Middle East, dithered. With Ankara's Syria policy in disarray, it decided to turn a blind eye to the increasing number of radicalised young men who used Turkish territory to wage a holy war against Assad.

American and European officials first raised concerns in 2012 that jihadists were using Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul to make their way to the Turkish city of Gaziantep before heading into Syrian territory to join the IS in its fight against the Syrian regime. But the Turks dragged their feet on imposing border controls, and instead charged that Europe was not providing them timely intelligence about the IS sympathisers from Belgium, Germany and France entering Turkey. 

Over time, extremism became a veritable instrument of Turkish statecraft—and also, not surprisingly, a threat within Turkey’s borders. Turkey, along with another problematic American ally, Saudi Arabia, provided support to Ahrar al-Sham, which in turn allegedly provided assistance to Jabhat al Nusra, both Syrian rebel groups that are linked to Al Qaeda. And while Ankara might think it can rein in these groups, it clearly cannot: Within Turkey’s borders, extremists have built up their own infrastructure, including communications networks, safe houses, medical facilities and illicit commerce that exist to support the fight in Syria. It would be naive to think that this could not be used in a fight against Turkey. The scenario that is emerging is similar to that of Pakistan which was propped up as a front line state in the West’s war against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and years later to combat the terrorist belonging to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Pakistan itself was caught up in the vortex of violence and continues to be embroiled in the Afghan quagmire. 

But critics have alleged that Erdoğan’s government has been unwilling to shut down supply lines from Turkey to territory controlled by IS. Certainly, questions about Turkey’s conduct toward the group remain unanswered. For instance, given all the violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s followers have perpetrated, why were 46 Turks that IS took hostage in Mosul released unharmed? Turkish and Western observers speculated that the Turks provided cash or guns or both to secure the release of these diplomats and their families, but neither Erdoğan nor any other Turkish official provided a clear explanation.

Erdoğan’s links to the Islamic State

A US-led raid on the compound housing the Islamic State's ‘chief financial officer’ Abu Sayyaf produced evidence that Turkish officials directly dealt with senior IS members, according to Martin Chulov of the Guardian.

Islamic State official Abu Sayyaf was responsible for directing the terror group’s oil and gas operations in Syria. The Islamic State earns about $ 10 million per month selling oil on black markets.

Documents and flash drives seized during the Sayyaf raid reportedly revealed links “so clear” and “undeniable” between Turkey and IS “that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara,” a senior western official familiar with the captured intelligence told the Guardian.

Erdoğan, being an Islamist himself and leader of a radical political party, the AKP has had no compunction in colluding with the Islamic State. There are several strategic and economic reasons for his proximity to the terrorist group: firstly, it is simply to avoid IS carrying out terror attacks inside Turkey; secondly, having embarked on a program of Islamisation of Turkey, Erdoğan does not see anything wrong in the IS ideology; thirdly, he has been using the elements of the IS to fight against his arch enemies, viz., the Kurds and Syrian President Assad; fourthly, and most importantly, Erdoğan’s family members and high ranking Turkish officials have been actively involved and are beneficiaries of the cross border smuggling of oil from Syria.

Erdoğan who always sheds crocodile tears for the plight of Syrians trapped between the hammer of hunger and the anvil of IS extremism, conceals the fact that his own son, Bilal Erdoğan, is involved in lucrative business of smuggling the Iraqi and Syrian plundered oil. Bilal Erdoğan who owns several maritime companies, had allegedly signed contracts with European operating companies to carry Iraqi stolen oil to different Asian countries.

A London-educated scion of wealthy family and the eldest daughter of totalitarian President Erdoğan, Sümeyye Erdoğan, more than once announced her intention to be dispatched to Mousl, Iraq’s once second-biggest city and IS’ stronghold to do relief works as a volunteer which drew public ire and vast condemnation from Turkey’s opposition parties. Moreover, the Turkish opposition parties accused the administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of seeking diligently to hide the truth concerning numerous financial malfeasances Erdoğan’s son, Bilal Erdoğan, was involved.

It is not just Russia that has been raising these questions about Turkish involvement in the oil smuggling racket. International media, including the Financial Times, have been running stories tracing just how IS refines oil then sells it to freelance traders, some of whom smuggle it into Turkey for resale on the black market.

Similar reports record how IS and other armed units smuggle in weapons and fighters across the same border areas.

In the light of these accusations, it can be inferred that the downing of the SU-24 was a pre-meditated act intended to send a message to the Russians to stay away from the Turkey-Syrian border.

Turkey a frontline state against IS terror?

What is Turkey’s importance in the war against IS? Given Turkey’s proximity to the IS, Turkey’s value is limited to real estate. The existence of Incirlik Air Base along with the fact that Turkey shares a 500-mile border with Syria is Erdoğan’s trump card. At least for the moment. Erdoğan’s raving and ranting and sabre-rattling may last till Obama’s tenure in the White House. In fact there are very few even in the Obama Administration who believe that Turkey can be part of the solution to the Syrian problem. As of today, Washington appears content to be able to access Incirlik. 

As long as Washington refrains from pulling up Ankara for its closeness with the IS, Turkey and Erdoğan will continue to play a double game in the so-called war against the IS, akin to Pakistan’s policy of “running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.”