“The country is at a critical juncture — or perhaps beyond it. Because of the sad loss of democracy within its borders and the repeated mistakes of [Turkey's] AKP [Justice and Development Party] government in Syria, because of the turbulence of the Middle East and the changing world scene, our big cities have become a new front for terrorists. Once we thought Turkey would be a shining role model for the Muslim world; now we are worried that our country may in fact be following some of its worst examples.”

These are the concluding remarks of renowned Turkish novelist Elif Shafak in a Jan. 3 piece in the British daily The Guardian. Within the first hour of the first day of 2017, terror had struck once again in Istanbul, taking 39 lives, heralding another gloomy year ahead for the Turks and leading to Shafak’s anguished lines.

Her piece is just one of many linking the latest escalation of terror in Turkey to the Syrian situation; indeed, this has been a recurring theme in this Al-Monitor column. In the space of a month, Turkey (Istanbul twice) has been rocked by three big terror attacks that have led many people to see a correlation between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies in Syria and their blowback in bloody terror attacks at home.

Veteran Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent that what makes “terrorism” in Turkey different from that in Europe and the Middle East is not the number of dead, but the diversity of those carrying out terror attacks.