The suicide bomber who killed 32 people in the border town of Suruç on Monday, 20 July, has been identified as Turkish citizen Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz. The 20-year old Kurdish university student from the Adiyaman province disappeared six months ago with his older brother, Yunus Emre, likely crossing the Syrian border to join ISIS forces. Spending months on a suspected terrorist watchlist, Alagoz had been attending regular meetings held by a Salafist group in his native province before his eventual disappearance, reports suggest.
His mother, after learning of the heinous attack carried out by her son, stood by her claim that Alagoz was ‘a good boy’.
The government’s response to the attack was clearly one which involved the beefing up of security along its border with Syria through a series of new security measures, including building a 150-km wall and reinforcing the already existing barbed-wire fence. But the response of the Turkish people has been deafening. Protests erupted after Monday’s attack demanding that more be done in the fight against terrorism, resulting in the death of two police officers and the looming threat of further exacerbating the deep ethnic tensions between the country’s Kurdish population and the rest of its citizens.
But what happens when even a wall can’t keep terrorists out? How does a country protect itself from terrorism when it comes from within? Today, 24 July, Turkish fighter jets bombed three different ISIS targets within Syria, which marks Turkey’s first reported direct combat with the Islamic State. However, with homegrown terrorism on the rise, not just in Turkey but around the world, how do we respond beyond building walls and bombing foreign enemies? Terrorism no longer has an unrecognizable face and speaks a foreign language. This is what Suruç has taught us, as well as Lyon and Paris, and is what will be illustrated by terrorist attacks yet to come. The face of terrorism is changing, and it seems to be becoming more and more recognizable.
The editorial team of Katoikos
