Would not have expected this, but the Turkish government actually funded the terrorists, just like the US funded the Taliban. Blowback's a b****. Only very top of article excerpted. Link valid for about a week. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8922-2003Nov23.html Turkish Suspects Tied to Guerrillas Government's Backing of Islamic Group Arouses Scrutiny After Blasts By Karl Vick Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, November 24, 2003; Page A01 BINGOL, Turkey, Nov. 23 -- The family of Gokhan Elaltuntas buried him in the dead of night, waiting until 2 a.m. Saturday to inter what bits remained of the soft-eyed young man after he detonated a truckload of fertilizer and petroleum outside an Istanbul synagogue seven days earlier. "We want to cleanse our surname, because we don't want people to know us as terrorists," said his uncle, Rifat Elaltuntas. Across town the mother of another suspected bomber, Azad Ekinci, moved out of the apartment where the family had lived for three decades. The family of Mesut Cabuk, whose passport was found in the wreckage outside a second synagogue, remained at home but indisposed. His mother tugged a smiling little boy -- the dead man's son -- through a door she then quietly closed on visiting reporters. Of the four suspects named in the bombings that traumatized Istanbul, three hailed from this gritty mountain town about 1,000 miles away in Turkey's eastern mountains. Notably religious, each of the suspects bore the markers of Islamic militancy familiar in biographies of suicide bombers, including travel to Pakistan for "religious training." But in Bingol, many people want answers, not from the shaken families of the accused, but from the government. Until four years ago, Turkey, a Western-leaning, avowedly secular country, had tacitly encouraged Islamic extremism in this region, judging it a useful tool in a sometimes dirty war against Kurdish separatists. A brutal religious underground group known as Hezbollah received guns from government arsenals, according to official investigations, and several thousand killings widely attributed to the group were officially ignored.
It might be a surprisin news to folks here, but people in Aisa, especially mid-Asia have always known Turkey's close ties with Eastern Islamic Fronts (??). In one of the Chines province, Estern Islamic Fronts openly recruit new bloods, train them in Turkey, provide them with amos (with the backing of Turks government) and carry out bombing, assination, kidnapping....
