Ankara bombing: who should one believe?
According to the Turkish government there are now clear links between the suicide bombing and ISIS; and according to a supposed German intelligence report we highlighted ten days ago, the Turkish government had been arming parts of ISIS. However, reports emerging from independent reporters ﻿ at the scene of Su﻿nday's﻿﻿ bombing paint a different picture; essentially of the Turkish ﻿﻿government controlling the news flow, closing Twitter, and uses its S﻿ecrecy A﻿ct to stop open press analysis of the atrocity. Turkey's General Elections are due to be held on November 1st, with the government warning of further violence in the meantime. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the Ankara bombing, nor indeed to the Suruc bo﻿mbing that it is said to have mirrored.﻿

ISTANBUL — After the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Turkish history, world leaders, including the pope, President Obama, Queen Elizabeth II and others, offered condolences to a grieving nation.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, though usually a dominating presence in public life, issued only a short statement and did not make a speech.

Just days earlier, Turkey had something to celebrate: Aziz Sancar, a Turkish-American scientist, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Instead of jubilation, a debate erupted on social media about whether he is truly Turkish, given that he is a distant relative of a lawmaker in the Kurdish party and was born in the Kurdish-dominated southeast. In an interview with the BBC, Dr. Sancar said: “I do not speak Kurdish. I am Turkish. That’s it.”