Less than a week after a bomb exploded on an Istanbul pedestrian mall, Turkish warplanes struck across northern Syria in towns and cities governed by Syrian Kurds. While President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his aides justify the attacks in counterterrorism, there is no indication that Syrian Kurds were responsible for the terror attack. Turkey has a long history of corrupting, if not fabricating, evidence, and its interior ministry regularly politicizes its investigations. This is why in the aftermath of the alleged 2016 coup attempt, for example, neither the Trump nor Biden administrations found credible the evidence their Turkish counterparts provided fingering Erdogan-ally-turned-adversary Fethullah Gülen.

Turkey proceeded to parade the suspect, a Syrian woman Ahlam Albashir, before the press in a “New York” sweatshirt. While Turkish officials said Albashir confessed that she was a Kurdish agent who took orders from the Kurdish-run Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, she appears instead to have links to the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army. In effect, the attack appears to be blowback similar to the 2016 assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara by a Turkish policeman. While Turkey claimed absent evidence that the assassin was a Gülen acolyte, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, an Al Qaeda-affiliated, Turkish-backed group in northern Syria, claimed responsibility. Erdogan used his monopoly over Turkish media to shut out discussion of evidence and demanded the press only finger suspects he found politically convenient.

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The reality that Erdogan seeks to impose for Turks inside Turkey is often at dissonance with the evidence-based reality the rest of the world knows. Erdogan has created a bubble in Turkey not unlike that which exists in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Azerbaijan, and Eritrea. As with these countries, the international community is under no obligation to bow to fiction.

The likely truth is that Turkey used the Istanbul bomb as a pretext to attack Syrian Kurds. This is tragic. The Syrian Kurds were the frontline of international defense against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State at a time when Turkey was complicit in their support if not directly in their armament.

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