Islamic State trying to capitalize on enmity between Kurds and the Turkish government

Bloodstains and broken bodies left after Turkey’s deadliest bombing this year cruelly underscore the complex rivalries swirling among the Turkish government, the Sunni militants of Islamic State and members of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurds.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed Islamic State for the devastating attack on a Kurdish wedding party late Saturday in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border.

The group has not claimed responsibility, but if it was behind the strike — which killed at least 54 people, about half of them children, according to the state-run Anatolia news agency — the carnage likely served several purposes, in the group’s eyes. Chief among those: fueling enmity between the Turkish state and the Kurds.

On the surface, there were other powerful motivations at play. Erdogan’s government is a sometimes-reluctant partner in the U.S.-led coalition confronting Islamic State, and Turkey has been hit over the last year by a string of bombings attributed to the extremist group, seemingly meant to punish the Turkish leader for taking the West’s side.

The bombing also bore the hallmarks of a revenge attack against the Kurds, whose ethnic brethren in Syria have helped inflict significant battlefield losses on Islamic State in that country’s multi-sided war. The wedding party would have been a tempting target: The bride and groom both came from well-known Kurdish families affiliated with a pro-Kurdish political party, the People’s Democratic Party, and Gaziantep is a known haven for Islamic State sleeper cells.

For Islamic State, though, the wedding-party attack would have been a prime opportunity to play two of its enemies off against one another. Here is a short primer on the Turkish government’s recent history with its Kurdish population and how the war next door in Syria has inflamed passions on both sides of that divide.

How did Turkey’s accord with Kurdish separatists break down?

A peace arrangement in 2013 had ended decades of fighting between Turkish forces and the militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. It ushered in hope of longer-term political reforms, spearheaded by Erdogan, to lift up a large and long-disenfranchised ethnic minority. But that accord fell apart last year amid a series of Islamic State-suspected attacks against Kurds who felt the government had failed to protect them.

Many Kurds believe Erdogan deliberately sought to draw Turks’ attention away from what he feared would be an unpopular move: joining forces with the West in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkish troops have been hounding PKK militants in their strongholds in the mountainous southeast for more than a year, a bloody struggle that has also caught up tens of thousands of civilians in the violence. Some 300 noncombatants have been killed in warfare that often rages in urban areas. The insurgents, in turn, have used suicide attacks and car bombings to target Turkish security forces

At the same time, the government has repeatedly accused the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, which won landmark representation in Parliament in June 2015, of supporting armed separatists. The party denies the charge.

The Turkish leader has repeatedly characterized the PKK as a greater threat to the Turkish state than Islamic State.

How has the latest attack increased tensions?

The Gaziantep blast galvanized already existing anger and mistrust between Turkey’s government and the Kurds. At funerals for bombing victims on Sunday and Monday, mourners shouted “Murderer Erdogan!” and threw rocks at government representatives who carried Turkish flags.

Turkey’s government, for its part, spoke Monday of the need to purge the Turkish-Syrian border of Islamic State’s presence. “Daesh should be completely cleansed from our borders, and we are ready to do whatever it takes,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Ankara, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

But Syrian Kurdish fighters hold much longer stretches of the frontier than does Islamic State, and many Kurds in Turkey believe that the ostensible targeting of the extremist group in northern Syria is a pretext to deny further territorial gains to Syrian Kurdish militias.

Is there a link between the latest attack and prior strikes against Kurds and their allies?

The wedding-party bombing in Gaziantep was reminiscent of some previous strikes, including a suicide bombing in July 2015 in the border town of Suruc, targeting Kurdish activists and their allies, and the attack in October on a pro-Kurdish rally in Ankara that left more than 100 dead. Islamic State was blamed for both strikes, but did not make any kind of claim. The device used in Saturday’s bombing was of the same type as those used in the Suruc and Ankara bombings, a senior security official told the Reuters news agency.

How are domestic politics driving Turkey’s role in the Syrian conflict?

Although it now formally supports the anti-Islamic State coalition, Turkey’s Islamist-leaning government — hoping and expecting that Syrian President Bashar Assad would be swiftly toppled — long turned a blind eye to Islamic State extremists using its frontier with Syria as a gateway to the battleground.

Turkey has been deeply alarmed by Kurdish battleground successes in Syria, notably in the border town of Kobani, where American backing helped them fight off an Islamic State onslaught. Erdogan’s government views the largely autonomous Kurdish region in eastern Syria as a strategic threat, believing it will strengthen separatist sentiments on the Turkish side of the border.

Turkey’s actions often seem aimed more at hindering Syrian Kurdish forces rather than actively targeting Islamic State fighters. A Turkish-backed Syrian rebel faction is reportedly making preparations to strike Islamic State fighters in the Syrian town of Jarabulus — which would simultaneously prevent advancing Syrian Kurdish fighters from taking control of another sensitive border area.

How might the Gaziantep attack bolster Erdogan’s authority?

The president’s allies have already been carrying out a wide-ranging purge in the wake of last month’s coup attempt, targeting people alleged to sympathize with Fethullah Gulen, an elderly cleric in self-imposed exile in the United States. News media freedom has been a principal casualty in the crackdown, with many outlets shuttered and journalists among the tens of thousands who have been arrested or detained.

Violence like the Gaziantep strike gives Erdogan even greater leeway in imposing press restrictions; the government has decreed a blackout on news coverage inside Turkey of the wedding-party attack.

Many Turks are supportive of sweeping government powers as the country has been hit this year by a string of bombings, widely seen as a spillover from the Syrian conflict. Bombings blamed on Islamic state have hit Istanbul’s Old City as well as its main shopping boulevard and main international airport.

Alarmingly for many Kurds, Erdogan has painted various threats to the country — Gulen loyalists, Islamic State and Kurdish separatists — with the same brush of harsh but vaguely worded condemnations, whipping up nationalist sentiment they fear will target them.

laura.king@latimes.com