[Centraal] Turkse strijd tegen IS & PKK #10

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 15:37 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:

[..]

Heb je nog een bron? Kan het nergens vinden nog. CNNTürk, Habertürk etc. melden nog niks.

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 15:37 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:
Momenteel hevige gevechten gaan rond Kızıltepe.

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 15:32 schreef Slayage het volgende:
de dader is ene 28 jarige nabil fadil syrier, de 11 slachtoffers zijn allen toeristen, 9 duitsers 2 koreanen

twitter:

abdbozkurt twitterde op dinsdag 12-01-2016 om 15:49:29 #Turkey: Suicide bomber in Istanbul identified as Nabil Fadli of #SaudiArabia national as opposed to gov't early claims of being #Syrian reageer retweet

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 15:56 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:
Brijit is geen Saudische naam? (naam van z'n moeder)

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PHOTOGRAPHS OF black smoke rising from a dense thicket of concrete buildings have by now become a painfully familiar emblem of ongoing wars in Syria and Iraq. So it’s perhaps less shocking than it should be that such images are now appearing from the cities of Turkey, a NATO member as well as a country thought to be one of the last anchors of order in a tumultuous region. With little international notice, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is engaged in a full-scale military campaign against ethnic Kurdish militants that has killed thousands, displaced hundreds of thousands and left parts of several large towns in ruins.

The Kurdish population under siege is not to be confused with that of northern Iraq or northern Syria, where Kurdish forces backed by the United States and other Western governments are fighting the Islamic State and carving out their own autonomous areas. The target of Mr. Erdogan’s offensive are Turkish citizens who live in the southeastern part of the country, where Kurds often are the majority ethnic group. In 2002, after first coming to office, Mr. Erdogan promised to end long-standing repression of the minority; he struck a cease-fire and opened negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed insurgent group.

That fragile detente unraveled last summer, not long after a Turkish political party supported by Kurds, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, won more than 10 percent of the vote in elections for parliament, denying Mr. Erdogan’s ruling party a majority. A Kurdish political rally was bombed, apparently by the Islamic State; blaming the government for failing to prevent it, the PKK carried out an attack on security forces. It has since dug into at least seven towns with a total population of more than 1 million.

The government has placed those urban areas under curfew, and both sides are using heavy weapons, including rocket launchers and mortars. Mr. Erdogan brags of having killed more than 3,000 militants. Last week the military said 225 PKK fighters had been dispatched in a neighborhood of Diyarbakir, a large city, and a nearby town in the last three weeks alone. The true scale and results of the fighting are difficult to judge, as the government has excluded journalists from the area and intimidated Turkish media.

Two conclusions are nevertheless easy to reach: Mr. Erdogan will never succeed in eliminating by force the PKK or Turkish Kurds’s aspirations for more autonomy, and by prosecuting his campaign he is impeding the fight against the Islamic State. Western governments have shied from pressuring the Turkish strongman about the offensive because they still count on his cooperation on multiple fronts, including in preventing refu­gee flows from Syria and allowing U.S. warplanes to operate from Turkish bases. But Mr. Erdogan needs to be pushed toward reopening negotiations with Turkish Kurdish leaders. A settlement that grants the Kurds and their communities more political rights is an essential component of what must eventually be a broader solution for Kurdish aspirations in the region.

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 19:25 schreef Loekie1 het volgende:
Veel Turken zien IS niet als terroristen

Op de dag dat een IS-lid zichzelf opblies en tegelijk tien mensen de dood injoeg, bleek uit een onderzoek in Turkije dat bijna 10 procent van de bevolking leden van Islamitische Staat niet als terroristen beschouwt. Meer dan 5 procent van de circa 78 miljoen Turken zegt zelfs het met de acties van de extremisten eens te zijn.
Het onderzoek is uitgevoerd door een belangrijke denktank in de hoofdstad Ankara. Voor de staat Turkije, tevens een belangrijk NAVO-lid, is het duidelijk: IS wordt gevormd door gevaarlijke terroristen. Turkije wordt onder meer bevolkt door soennitische moslims. Van de Turken vindt 21 procent dat het soennitische IS de moslims in de wereld vertegenwoordigt. Het overgrote deel van de inwoners vindt dat Islamitische Staat, naast de verbannen Koerdische organisatie PKK, staat voor gevaarlijk terrorisme.
http://www.telegraaf.nl/b(...)s_terroristen__.html

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 17:20 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:
Ondertussen in Silopi

https://vid.me/17QE

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Op dinsdag 12 januari 2016 19:38 schreef ClapClapYourHands het volgende:
Weer een hoop wapens etc. in beslag genomen nadat een auto tot stoppen was gedwongen

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Inzittenden zijn gevlucht.

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Barely one hour after a suicide blast ripped through an Istanbul square packed with tourists on Tuesday morning, the Turkish government imposed a media blackout.
Ten Germans died in the bombing in the historic neighborhood of Sultanahmet. Turkish officials said the suicide bomber was linked to the Islamic State militant group.
The prime minister’s office quickly rushed out a ban on media coverage of the blast, citing a 2011 Turkish law that allows the government to institute a temporary blackout to protect public order or national security. A few hours later, the ban was backed by a judicial order from an Istanbul court.
Blanket Media Bans Have Become More Frequent
Tuesday's media ban followed a pattern the government has established after recent attacks.
After twin blasts also blamed on the Islamic State killed over 100 people in the Turkish capital of Ankara last October, the government immediately issued a temporary ban on pictures of the bombings or images that might “create a feeling of panic,” and a few days later banned all reporting on the investigation into the attacks.
Turkey briefly banned access to Twitter after another suspected Islamic State suicide bombing three months earlier, which killed 32 people in the border city of Suruc, citing a local court ban on images of the blast.
Such blanket media bans have become more frequent in recent years. The government has also imposed them after corruption and political scandals. Turkish newspaper Hurriyet counted over 150 different gag orders on media reporting in the country between 2010 and 2014.
"At every crisis, larger or smaller in scale, the Turkish government's knee-jerk reaction has been to gag the media," said Nina Ognianova, the Europe and Central Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Bans Are Rarely Effective
Turkish media outlets trying to comply with the ban on Tuesday struggled to understand its terms.
While the judicial order said the ban included all news reporting and social media posts about the bombing and the ensuing investigation, CNN’s Turkish channel, CNN Turk, reported that the ban covered images of the blast and its aftermath. Several Turkish TV channels pulled images of the bombing but continued to provide news updates throughout the day, including the state-run broadcaster TRT.
Many journalists ignored the ban, including most international journalists in the country. "Really, the best way to ensure the global media covers a bombing is to impose a broadcast ban on it," Kareem Sheehan, Middle East reporter for The Guardian, wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, images of the blast continued to be widely shared on social media, where the ban was the subject of much satire and disdain.
"Media bans imposed by the Turkish government are rarely effective," David Diaz-Jogeix, director of programs at press freedom group Article 19, told The WorldPost by email. "Some media simply defy the bans. ... Additionally, even where Turkey is preventing domestic broadcasting, there are other sources of information including social media and international media."
... pic.twitter.com/QTTrLvbA1J
— Hikayesiz (@MeralSfroglu) January 12, 2016
The Turkish satire magazine Penguen shows a cartoon of souls of bomb victims declining to discuss the cause of their death. The speech bubbles read: "Why did you die brother?" "I don't know. You?" "There is a media ban, I can't talk."
But Bans Do Serve A Purpose
Yet even if the media ban doesn't achieve a total news blackout, it still restricts information for a large part of the Turkish population, experts told The WorldPost.
Most journalists who ignored Tuesday's ban write for print or online outlets, while the ban was mostly observed by the broadcast media, which has the greatest reach throughout Turkey, CPJ's Ognianova said.
"Television is still the biggest, most influential news source in Turkey, particularly in rural, provincial areas where Internet penetration is still low," she explained. These areas are traditionally home to the support base of the ruling Justice and Development party, or AKP, and some experts argued that the ban is mostly aimed at them.
"The government doesn’t think it can control all information for all people, but if they can control information for their key constituency of AKP supporters, that is valuable to them," said Nate Schenkkan, a Turkey expert at pro-democracy group Freedom House.
For some AKP supporters who are critical of the Turkish media, the ban could bolster the tough image of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is trying to expand the powers of the presidency. "Erdogan is probably playing to his supporters, who look favorably upon a strong leader," Diaz-Jogeix said.

ONUR ÇOBAN/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
People leave flowers for victims of the attack at Istanbul's Sultanahmet square after it was reopened to the media and the public on Jan. 13, 2016. Many journalists ignored the media ban the Turkish government imposed after the bombing.
Authorities Get More Control Over The Narrative
While the bans can’t make the news go away, they do give the government more control over how crises are reported.
"The government may be trying to delay reporting on the attacks by independent commentators, in order to try and establish its own narrative regarding the attacks," Diaz-Jogeix told The WorldPost.
After Tuesday's blast, for example, Erdogan was quick to condemn both the Islamic State group, which officials said was responsible for the bombing, and the PKK, the Kurdish militant group Turkey is fighting in bloody battles in the country's southeast.
"One terrorist organization is no different than the other," Erdogan said on Tuesday.
While the Islamic State and Kurdish fighters associated with the PKK are fighting each other in Syria, the Turkish government has repeatedly linked the two groups. After the Suruc bombing by the Islamic State, Turkish forces bombed both the Islamic State in Syria and the PKK in Iraq, and rounded up PKK suspects inside Turkey.
"They use [this narrative] to reinforce the main argument, which is the fight against the PKK," Schenkkan said.

KAYHAN OZER/POOL PHOTO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks in Ankara, Turkey on Jan. 12, 2016. Turkish officials said the bomber who carried out the attack in the Sultanahmet district was a member of ISIS, but Erdogan also condemned Kurdish militants.
Bans Also Help Authorities Control The Press
The media ban also helps the government control supporters and punish dissenters in the press.
"Given that the government effectively controls much of the mainstream media, once it has made its position clear, it would then be able to ensure that the main channels report on the bombing following an established government line," Diaz-Jogeix said.
The remaining independent media outlets are left in a state of uncertainty. Ognianova warned that journalists who flout the ban risk up to 3 years in jail under Turkey's broadly worded criminal laws.
“It is implemented arbitrarily, like all freedom of expression laws in Turkey," Schenkkan said. “It gives a way to frame people who violate the ban ... Then when they later do reporting on corruption, the brand association is that they’re anti-Turkish.”
Press freedom advocates say media freedoms have deteriorated sharply under Erdogan’s rule as prime minister and then as president. The government has expanded control over the media, while prosecutions and threats against journalists have spiked in recent years.
Erdogan's media crackdown has polarized the country, Diaz-Jogeix said, energizing his supporters while fueling discontent among government opponents.

LEFTERIS PITARAKIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Press freedom advocates say media bans end up making people less safe.
Ultimately, press freedom advocates say, media bans end up making everyone in Turkey less safe.
"Gagging the media does not relieve tensions; on the contrary, it kindles fear and uncertainty as reliable news are rapidly replaced by rumors," Ognianova said. "The public needs information in times of crises more than ever."