Post Script -- The PKK -- Alternate Battleground

By Frank Hyland

The drawback, the downside, in doing CT is that even when you’re right in issuing a warning, there often isn’t much enjoyment or satisfaction in the result, and sometimes a great deal of sadness. This time there is at least some degree of satisfaction. As we told you, our readers, here on December 9th, the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) would attempt to retaliate for a now-growing series of Turkish attacks on PKK Headquarters and associated camps in Iraq’s Qandil Mountain area. The attempt, we said, would be launched from one of the Kurdish-populated slum areas near one of Turkey’s major metropolitan cities. The prediction didn’t require a great deal of prescience; it was one of the safest bets to be had that a cellphone call would be placed from Iraq into Turkey.

It didn’t take long. On Monday, December 24th, barely a week after the first Turkish bombing raid on December 16th, alert Turkish police officers near a subway station in Istanbul stopped and arrested a 25-year-old man with almost seven pounds of the telltale A4 explosive popular with the PKK concealed in his backpack. A followon raid at a suspected safehouse netted another individual along with more explosives and bomb-related mechanisms. This attempt is reminiscent of another just this past April 8th, also in Istanbul, when a woman left a backpack device concealing eleven pounds of A4 in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. In this latest incident, had almost seven pounds of high explosive detonated in the enclosed spaces of a subway station in one of the most crowded districts in the city, the carnage would have been horrendous.

The lesson for Turkish authorities is that the PKK’s Istanbul-area cell is among the group’s most highly trusted, given the importance the PKK hierarchy must attach to retaliation at this juncture. The corollary is that continued vigilance is of the utmost importance because the PKK’s urban campaign has just begun.

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