Should you visit Turkey? Kurdish militant group says 'no.'
A Kurdish militant group known as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) claimed responsibility Friday for a car-bomb attack earlier in the week in Istanbul, which left 11 dead.
The group, generally considered an off-shoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), also warned foreigners that they were no longer safe in Turkey, adding to the woes of a tourism industry already in freefall.
The bombing is part of a resurgent conflict between Kurdish militants and the Turkish government, after a fragile peace agreement disintegrated last summer.
"We again warn foreign tourists who are in Turkey and who want to come to Turkey: foreigners are not our target but Turkey is no longer a reliable country for them," read TAK's statement. "We have just started the war."
This latest attack, which took place in Istanbul's central tourist district, near the famed Grand Bazaar, was originally reported as having been a remote-controlled car bomb, detonated as a police van drove by. TAK's Friday statement, however, said that it was a suicide attack, according to Al Jazeera.
It was the fourth major bombing in the city this year. On Wednesday, another suicide bombing in the southeastern town of Midyat killed three police and three civilians, the Associated Press reported.
The TAK, which also claimed two car bomb attacks earlier in the year in the capital, Ankara, justified their action as a response to Turkish military operations in the Kurdish-dominated southeast of the country.
While government forces and Kurdish militants are locked in tit-for-tat military clashes, the two are also competing to shape Turkish citizens' "hearts and minds" about the conflict. The Kurdish groups portray the government as brutal oppressors of a minority population with a right to autonomy, while the authorities paint those same militants as having complete disregard for the carnage they cause.
"TAK is just another name for PKK," an anonymous Turkish official told Al Jazeera. "The terrorists are trying to hide behind the alphabet soup to disassociate themselves from civilian deaths."
While the conflict is decades-old and has accounted for tens of thousands of fatalities, this current phase is taking a higher toll on the country than at any other time, as Alexander Christie-Miller reported for The Christian Science Monitor. Alongside tensions with Russia – which constitutes a key tourism market for Turkey – and attacks by ISIS, the renewed struggle between Kurds and the Turkish authorities has contributed to a severe loss of tourism. Turkey has seen a 28 percent year-on-year decline in tourist arrivals, the biggest drop in a decade: Visitor numbers last month hit a 17-year low. In March, the US State Department issued a warning of "increased threats from terrorist groups throughout Turkey."
The Turkish government strives to portray militant attacks as evidence of why the Kurdish people are turning against the PKK and its offshoots, hoping, by doing so, that they will promote the very dissatisfaction they claim to be illustrating.
"The irony is that there is serious dissatisfaction with the PKK within the Kurdish population," Aliza Marcus, author of "Blood and Belief: the PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence," told the Monitor earlier this month, "but the government's response has been so heavy-handed that they have not really undermined its support."
