Monday's suicide bombing in Suruç, a town in the southern Şanlıurfa province close to the Syrian border, claimed the lives of 31 and left over 100 wounded. During his visit to the region on Tuesday, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said that even though investigations continue, the "heinous" crime was most probably carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). On a similar note, officials in Ankara have said that the bombing could have been executed as retaliation by ISIS.
Turkey has been accused of supporting ISIS, but Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize ISIS as a threat and declared it a terrorist organization on October 10, 2013. ISIS showed its first sign of hostility to Turkey after taking Mosul by taking 49 Turkish consulate personnel hostage on June 11, 2014. Turkey was able to conclude negotiations and rescue all of the hostages unharmed on Sept. 20, 2014, while being accused of inaction in the fight against ISIS throughout the process. A short time after the conclusion of the hostage crisis, news of the ISIS assault of Kobani, a mostly Kurdish town in Syria near the Turkish border, broke. The attack caused an influx of 200,000 refugees, including religious minorities of the region, such as Yazidis and Christians, all of whom were allowed into Turkey. Although Turkey did not send any troops into the fight in Kobani, it granted passage to Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) peshmerga forces and provided them with four trucks of arms, which was later praised by KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani.
Additionally, due to the increasing ISIS threat, Turkey launched Operation Shah Euphrates in late February 2015 to evacuate and relocate the Tomb of Süleyman Shah located in Syria. Furthermore, after months of talks between Turkey and the U.S., the train-and-equip program to aid moderate Syrian opposition groups fighting ISIS began in early May 2015. The first set of fighters who finished training was sent to Syria on July 12.
Turkey continues to fight ISIS, as it has been launching operations against ISIS and its supporters in Turkey, during which numerous ISIS-affiliated web sites were shut down and hundreds were detained. Official sources have also released statistics regarding the fight against ISIS. According to the statistics, 1,350 people have deported and approximately 13,500 people have been barred from entering Turkey. Moreover, the 800-kilometer border with Syrian is under surveillance day and night by drones and reconnaissance aircraft. The sources have said that a 270-kilometer stretch has been lit, 363 kilometers of trenches have been dug and a 1,210-kilometer patrol road was renewed. In addition, it has been asserted that 48,000 border crossings were intercepted and 175,000 people were caught trespassing since the beginning of the Syrian civil war five years ago.
