Turkey Says Deadly Bombings Conducted by Islamic State

As many as 128 people were killed in Ankara, Turkey, on Saturday when two suicide bombers attacked a pro-Kurdish peace rally. It is the deadliest suicide bombing in Turkey’s history. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said investigators are close to identifying suspects, saying today that “It was determined how the suicide bombers got there. We’re close to a name, which points to one group.” Security sources told Reuters that the Islamic State is suspected of being behind the attacks and that the bombing on Saturday resembled the Islamic State’s attack in Suruc in July.

The attack stokes political tensions in Turkey just three weeks before a contentious election that was called when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — which has been the dominant political force in the country for a decade and maintains a plurality in the parliament — could not form a governing coalition earlier this year. Some people in Turkey see the attack as an effort to undermine the AKP’s security platform, while others see the attack as politically convenient and point out that the Islamic State, which has been quick to claim credit for attacks, has not said if it was responsible.

Israeli-Palestinian Violence Continues with Airstrike in Gaza

Violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza continued over the weekend. According to Reuters’ tally, “Four Israelis and 23 Palestinians have died in 12 days of bloodshed.” On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes targeted a weapons factory in Gaza, killing two civilians, a pregnant woman and her 3-year-old daughter. It is the first time an Israeli airstrike has killed civilians since the war in Gaza last summer. The strike was in response to a rocket launched from Gaza on Saturday. A Palestinian woman was stopped while driving a crudely constructed car bomb on a West Bank road near Jerusalem on Saturday. Large Palestinian protests have been occurring across the West Bank.

Headlines

• An Iranian court convicted Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian of charges including espionage, though it is unclear if he has been sentenced; the verdict has drawn outrage from journalists and press freedom advocates.

• Pro-Assad allies fighting in Syria have suffered senior losses recently: On Sunday, Hezbollah commander Hassan Hussein al-Hajj was killed near Idlib and on Friday, Iran announced that Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani, who coordinated Iranian-backed militias in Syria, was killed in Aleppo.

• Iran’s parliament voted in favor of implementing the internationally negotiated nuclear agreement reached in July despite an angry hearing that included accusations of death threats; a final vote will be held on Tuesday.

• The Obama administration announced on Friday it was ending its overt train-and-equip mission for Syrian rebels, saying it would focus on providing weapons and ammunition and instructing some rebel leaders on how to call in airstrikes.

• Iranian state media reported that the country’s military successfully tested a new surface-to-surface long-range missile.

Arguments and Analysis

“Egyptian parliamentary elections are just a sideshow in the Sissi regime” (Robert Springborg, Monkey Cage)

“Small surprise that in the face of these profound constraints on the election and on the parliament to emerge from them, the forces contesting for seats have dissolved into political incoherence, precisely the outcome those constraints were designed to achieve. The Muslim Brotherhood has been criminalized and thousands of its members imprisoned, removing one powerful electoral bloc from the equation. True oppositionists who emerged as a result of the 2011 uprising have divided over the issue as to whether to boycott or participate in the elections and, if the latter, under which banner or banners to contest them. The long-standing ‘party-lets’ nurtured by the regimes of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and now Sissi to provide democratic window dressing, have struggled to define their positions as either out-and-out champions of the new president or mild critics of him. The only ‘party’ large and capable enough to offer a full slate of candidates nationally, ‘For the Love of Egypt,’ is essentially a creation of the military high command, but it is not the official regime party in the same fashion in which its predecessor, the National Democratic Party, was under former president Anwar Sadat and Mubarak. To round out this bleak picture, coteries of retired generals have formed their own parties, one seeking to attract Mubarak loyalists skeptical of Sissi, while another is cheerleading for him and denigrating the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet set a powerful example” (Issandr El Amrani, In Pursuit of Peace)

“There are several reasons the National Dialogue succeeded, including strong popular and international pressure to avoid the Egyptian scenario. A key factor was that the Quartet had real support in Tunisian society. The UGTT [Tunisian General Labour Union], despite years of dictatorship, had managed to build a national network of over 400,000 members and today has the ability to call for massive general strikes that can paralyse the economy. While the UGTT represents labour, the UTICA [Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts] represents capital, the influential and moneyed business elite. The human rights league and the lawyers’ syndicate are veterans of the opposition to the Ben Ali regime and played an important role in the 2011 revolution. Together, these four organisations had both moral clout and political brawn; they could mobilise public opinion and steer the national debate. The UGTT and UTICA, precisely because they are often at loggerheads on labour issues, made for a particularly compelling duo in jointly pushing an agenda of compromise.”

-J. Dana Stuster

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