Uh oh! we are so awfully shocked - again

Who killed Andrey Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Ankara? Officially, the assassin is a young anti-riot police officer. According to the government narrative, he must be a pawn of the Gülenist terrorists who wanted to sabotage Turkey's relations with Russia - just like the fighter jet pilots who shot down a Russian Su-24 on Nov. 24, 2015. This narrative is highly problematic. In reality, the Russian ambassador was the victim of an ugly sectarian war in this part of the world.   

During the early video productions of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), then-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu suggested that: "Past anger [of], alienations and insults [against the Sunnis] have caused a reaction [which is ISIL]. Such an accumulation of anger [ISIL men's anger] would not have existed if Sunni Arabs in Iraq had been not alienated." According to this logic, the poor Sunnis were beheading infidels because they had been angry, alienated and insulted. 

There was a similar reflection in the words of the ambassador's assassin during the murder: "Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!" It was not without a reason why the assassin also shouted "Allah-u akbar" ["God is Greatest," in Arabic] - the same slogan you may hear in Gaza or at Islamist rallies in Istanbul. 

Who alienated and insulted the Sunni police officer who killed the Russian ambassador? Wrong diagnosis, again. A survey earlier this year found that 13.6 percent of Turks (nearly 11 million) do NOT view ISIL as a terrorist group; and 22 percent (nearly 18 million) do NOT view it as a threat to Turkey (unsurprisingly, the percentages are higher among those who vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party).

The Russian ambassador was killed because in March the...