Welcome to the most vulnerable country to terrorism
As long as the Turkish government does not attach priority to the fight against IS, Turkey will remain the most vulnerable country in the world.
They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind. For many, this saying applies to the shocking terrorist attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. The usual suspect — although it did not declare any formal responsibility — is naturally the Islamic State (IS). The three suicide bombers who blew themselves up June 28, inflicting a devastating blow to Turkish public spirits, to the authority of the government and to the weight of the country in the international political scene, have been identified and point toward IS involvement.
There have been a series of mini-massacres known to be perpetrated by IS during the last year with hundreds of lives lost and more than 1,000 wounded, but all of these were not sufficient to make IS the No. 1 terrorist threat to Turkey.
In the Istanbul airport attack, the culprits belong to the lands, and presumably the Muslim societies, of the former Soviet Union. One is Chechen or Daghestani from the Northern Caucasus, and the other two are from the Turkic republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. At the time of this writing, the names of two of the three, Vadim Osmanov and Rakim Bulgarov, both carrying Russian passports, were officially announced by Turkish authorities.
Osmanov and Rakim were known to be active IS members. Turkish security officials are not competent in terms of intelligence gathering to thwart such terror attacks, but they are quite efficient in terms of tracking the culprits after the fact.
