The final nail in the coffin of Turkey's soft power

The monstrous attack on Istanbul's iconic Reina club in the first hours of the new year has inevitably triggered a new wave in the lifestyle debate among secularists in Turkey. Most probably that was the leitmotiv of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which sent one of its exclusively trained assassins to kill 39 in a matter of minutes before vanishing into thin air despite the heavy police presence in the area. 

The first grandiose manifestation of ISIL's declared fight with the secular Western lifestyle was the Paris attacks of November 2015, since France is historically seen as the cradle of secular liberalism. In a statement claiming responsibility for the attacks, they referred to the Bataclan as the place where "hundreds of apostates had gathered in a profligate prostitution party."

Reina, just like the Bataclan, was chosen as a target to demonstrate what happens to apostates in ISIL's world as they knew perfectly well that in recent years, the patrons of the club were mostly Arabs. There was little surprise that among the 25 foreign victims of the Reina attack, seven were identified as Saudi Arabians, three were Lebanese, two were Tunisians, two were Moroccans and two were Jordanians. 

So the Reina attack, in fact, killed two birds with one stone; flexing muscle against Turkey while providing a token of retaliation against Turkish troops' march toward al-Bab in Syria but, more importantly, putting the last nails in the coffin for whatever is left of Turkey's soft power. 

The soft power rhetoric was the highlight of the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) foreign policy in the 2000s when they were crafting a positive "Turkish story" to sell to the world. "Justice, legitimacy, equality in representation,...