Eight years after the Islamic State (ISIS) suicide bombing in Turkey’s southern Şanlıurfa (Riha) province, known as the Suruç Massacre, families of victims continue to fight for justice as they face charges for contempt of court, Mezopotamya agency reported.
One of the suspects, Yakup Şahin, was sentenced to 34 counts of life in prison over the death of 33 young activists in the massacre. The trial continues for fugitive suspects Deniz Büyükçelebi and İlhami Balı, the so-called mastermind of the numerous ISIS attacks in Turkey. Şahin faced trial while behind bars, and was never brought to the courtroom to face families of victims or testify in person.
Meanwhile, nine people, including survivors and the victims’ families, are facing charges for insulting the court, over their protests at the twenty first hearing of the case.
On 20 July 2015, shortly after Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its supermajority in parliament in the June elections for the first time since 2002, ISIS members detonated a bomb in the midst of a gathering of young Kurdish and left-wing activists who were planning a visit across the border into Kobanê, as part of efforts to rebuild the Syrian Kurdish town in the wake of the great devastation caused by the Syrian civil war and an ISIS siege.
The attack killed 33 people, and left more than 100 injured in Suruç, the sister town on the Turkish side of the border.
Some victims were older. Yasemin Boyraz was 31-years-old when she lost her mother in the attack.
“I still see myself as 31, I haven’t grown since,” she told Mezopotamya.
“We are exhausted, both materially and spiritually,” Boyraz said. “In the last hearing, there were three ISIS members who spoke as witnesses when they should have been suspects. Their testimony gave us the chills. They were calm and collected, recounting how easily they entered Turkey and strut about in the country.”
The court found Boyraz’s mother Bahar Nazegül Boyraz 50 percent at fault, the grieving woman said. “She was at fault because the gathering didn’t have a permit. My mother went through seven detailed searches on the way from Istanbul to Suruç. ISIS murderers were strutting about. How is my mother at fault? She was massacred in Suruç, is Suruç not in Turkey? Why was my mother found in fault?”
One of the suspects, Abdullah Ömer Aslan, was given a shave of his full beard and allowed to leave by a back door, according to Feti Aydın, who lost his son in the bombing and was injured himself.
“There was an ISIS flag in his bag when he was captured. Why was Abdullah Ömer Aslan not put on trial?” the injured father asked. “Our lawyers uncovered everything, with documentation. We revealed that İlhami Balı received treatment at a public hospital when he was wanted with an Interpol red bulletin. We have proven that the murderers walk free.”
In June this year, the families’ lawyer Gülhan Kaya was arrested in a dawn raid on her home. Earlier this week, 6 university students were arrested as they distributed leaflets for a memorial for the massacre. In contrast, Halis Bayancuk, facing charges for being one of the top cadres of ISIS in Turkey, was released from prison earlier in the week.
The trial does not include any state officials or members of Turkish security forces, whose apparent negligence allowed the bombing to happen.
“As ISIS and Kurdish Hizbullah leaders are released one by one with the gift of impunity, it is not a simple case of ‘lawlessness’ to throw even those who want to commemorate the victims of the massacres they caused into prisons. It is a repetition of a kind of ‘new law’, ‘new state’ declaration,” wrote Hakkı Özdal in his article for Evrensel newspaper on the anniversary of the massacre.
The massacre marked a historical threshold, Özdal said.
“Having lost the June elections, the AKP and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the forces they represent, had to form new alliances among the ruling classes and bureaucracy. They were forced to do so in order to continue building their regime. The Suruç Massacre was a threshold that fully opened the door to this new era, triggering the wave of violence that summer, and dragging the country into chaos and a constant state of emergency. Thus the environment was made to suit the comprehensive goals of the Turkish-Islamic political alliance,” the analyst said.
Kobanê has been a symbolic town in the decade long conflict, and first came to prominence in 2014 when ISIS laid siege to the town and its surrounding villages. Kurdish-led local forces, backed by the US-led international coalition, managed to turn the fight around and eventually defeat the jihadist group.
The members of Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF) gathered in Suruç were bringing with them toys and games for the children of Kobanê, to bring a semblance of normalcy back into their lives amid the devastation, when the massacre happened.
