'Wishing you life'

It is not easy to be an intellectual in Turkey. It is even more difficult to be a diva. Like her or not, Demet Akbağ has become synonymous with extraordinarily good performance not only on the theater stage, but at every moment of her life.

"Expect no New Year message from me. I can only wish [you] life. That's all … #Kayseri" wrote Akbağ after the heinous car bomb blast in Kayseri that claimed the lives of 14 beloved sons and wounded more than 50 on Dec. 17.

She indeed summed up the feelings of many people in this country. At a time when the official and non-official propaganda channels are working to convince people open up their homes to Syrian refugees, Turkey itself is gradually turning into one of those tumultuous spots on the world map. 

Turkey is capable of solving the unfortunate situation it has been pulled into. But under a number of different pretexts, the country's security network has lost many important personnel in recent years. Many nationalists and secularists were hunted during the era of government-Fethullah cooperation in the recent past, while others were hunted down during the government's more recent anti-Fethullah campaign. Clearly, the end result of such purges is an acute security and intelligence deficiency.

The Syria problem was not something Turks might have cared much about when it was just a fight between a secularist dictatorship and Islamists zealots supported by Turkey and the West. But then Russia came in.

The milder Islamists and the more radical Islamists went their separate ways. Then the Kurds joined the fight. Several anti-government factions started fighting amongst themselves. The Kurds played their cards well, shifting allegiances between Damascus, Washington and Moscow and...