Just Out: My new piece on the implications of the Istanbul bombings. A new break in the case indicates the bombers had originally hoped to hit the US Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, but were thwarted by tight security, moving next to the "softer" targets of the synagogues and the British outfits. That interrogation of Fevzi Yitiz also indicates Bin Laden did bless the attacks, which were perpetrated by Turkish Islamists who had trained in the Afghan camps.

Reuel Marc Gerecht told me, the Istanbul bombings - as well as the wave of recent bombings in Casablanca, Riyadh, Pakistan - indicate Al Qaeda is no longer so easily able to project itself lethally back into the US and Europe. He says the pattern we are seeing of Islamist extremist groups targeting Middle Eastern states is somewhat back to the future.

But Asla Aydinbastas, a Turkish journalist, told me, what we are in fact seeing is the expansion and metamorphosis of Al Qaeda from an "Arab" organization into one that has attracted disaffected Islamist extremists around the globe, from France to Jakarta.

While the implications of this debate strike me as fairly shocking - revealing as they do how very little the US and its allies seem to really know about Al Qaeda and how it is evolving -- both Turkish and American analysts offer a note of cautious optimism. The Middle Eastern states affected by this new iteration of Al-Qaeda-affiliated, domestic Islamist terrorist groups will not hesitate to crack down ruthlessly against them -- with much less fuss over civil liberties concerns.

These strikes "differ from the previous kind of terrorism Turkey faced," Abdullah Akwuz, of the Turkish business association Tusiad told me. "There is no popular support for the recent attacks. And I think if there previously existed any kind of sympathy to those in Al Qaeda - this is gone entirely, given the fact that most of those killed were fellow Muslim citizens. And they [Al Qaeda] are destroying themselves by doing that."

Posted by Laura at December 18, 2003 12:11 PM