What is the reason for this tolerance of ISIL members?
We now know how the terrorist, who caused four people to die and hundreds to be injured by planting a bomb in a political party rally in Diyarbakır, set out on this road.
He was influenced by a person who joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who fought a while in Syria and came back to Adıyaman, Turkey, and who was never, in any way, monitored. The bomber first became a sympathizer then evolved into a militant.
Now, here is a story from daily Bir Gün published last weekend: Four mujahedeen, who fought for ISIL in Syria for nine months, with three women and five children, were caught by the gendarmerie while trying to enter Turkey illegally. The ISIL members were interrogated by MİT and the military, after which they were freed by Kilis Peace Court despite the prosecutor’s demand for their arrest.
Another story I read earlier on the Chief of Staff website was about one Turkish citizen and 13 foreigners trying to cross the border to Syria to join ISIL. The Turkish citizen was released upon the prosecutor’s instruction, while the foreigners were handed over to the police for extradition.
Doesn’t this sound interesting to you, too?
If you participate in a march in this country, you may be jailed on an absurd accusation such as “being a member of terror organization.” If you share a caricature in social media, you can be arrested for insulting statesmen.
But if you join ISIL and cross the border illegally to Syria, fight in the civil war and after want to come back to your country, nothing happens to you; you are not even arrested.
Not only are you not arrested but your activities are also tolerated, such as training the Diyarbakır bomber.
Why? How? Doesn’t Turkey consider ISIL a terrorist organization?
Those who admit that they have joined ISIL and confessed that they have fought with them; are they not considered “a member of a terror organization?”
Time to go back to the bell jar
One of the conditions of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Chair Devlet Bahçeli for a coalition is for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to go back to the “Çankaya bell jar.”
Bahçeli is making a metaphor here; there are no plans to put a bell jar on the Çankaya mansion.
The building at Beştepe being used as the presidential palace today was built as an annex building for the office of the prime minister. The justification for it was that offices of the Prime Ministry were scattered all over Ankara and thus, business was hard to undertake.
The building was erected for this purpose, because the head of the executive branch in Turkey is the Prime Ministry. If Erdoğan was to stay as prime minister, he would not have offered the building to the president.
Erdoğan moved there before the elections because he thought people would allow his one-man administration ambitions and he would rule in a presidential, if not semi-presidential, system. The calculation was wrong.
For this reason, he should return the building to its original owner, the Prime Ministry.
Whether he would like to retreat to Çankaya or the Huber Mansion, it is up to him. He can, if he wishes to, move to Vahdettin Mansion.
But the metaphor of the “Çankaya bell jar” points out one thing: “Go back to your constitutional boundaries; do not continue to openly violate the constitution.”
