Turkey's anti-terror fight on three fronts

Most countries, especially in the West, had no awareness of a terrorism threat on their territory until al-Qaeda's shocking acts on Sept. 11, 2001. In a sense, 9/11 was the opening act of a wave of global guerilla warfare.

Of course, before 9/11 there was also a wave of radical left-wing terrorism in the 1970s like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhoff in Germany, and the Revolutionary Organization 17 November in Greece. There were also raids, hijackings and kidnappings by Palestinian groups. In the U.K. there was (and partly still is) the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and in Spain there was the Basque Country and Freedom (ETA) group - both expressing ethnic/sectarian-origin radicalism and causing the two countries to develop decades-long anti-terror strategies. 

But there are not many countries in the world that have to carry out an anti-terror fight against more than one organization on more than one front, (perhaps with the exception of Israel, fighting both Hamas and Hezbollah). Today's Turkey is carrying out an anti-terror fight on three fronts and against three organizations at once: One local, one regional, and the third global in scale.

Locally, the Turkish security services have been trying to counter acts of terror by the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), aiming not only at official state targets but also at business and political targets and American targets in Turkey.

Regionally, there is the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been waging an armed campaign since 1984 that has claimed more than 40,000 lives so far. The PKK's original strategy was to carve out an independent Kurdish state out of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. With the collapse last year of a three-year dialogue...