Category: USA

Turkey could be America’s most important regional ally, above Iraq, even above Israel, if both sides manage the relationship correctly.

Sarai Sierra’s Photos Become Big Sellers As Family Puts Them Online

By ALYSSA NEWCOMB (@alyssanewcomb) and NICK SCHIFRIN (@nickschifrin)

Feb. 5, 2013

Sarai Sierra, from New York, has been missing in Turkey since Jan. 21, 2013. (Courtesy Sarai Sierra’s family)

The family of Sarai Sierra, an amateur New York photographer slain while on a trip to Turkey, put her photos up for sale today and quickly sold enough photographs to pay forher funeral, the woman’s brother said today.

The photos remain on sale and the profits will now be going to her two young sons, the family said.

Sierra, 33, was found bludgeoned to death near a highway in Istanbul on Saturday. Her iPhone and iPad, the tools she used to share her photos with her thousands of Instagram followers were reportedly missing.

The Staten Island mother of two traveled to Turkey alone on Jan. 7 after a friend had to cancel. It was Sierra’s first overseas trip, and she kept in contact with her family the entire time, they said, sharing stories of her journey and posting photos online.

“Sarai’s passion for photography and love for capturing the beauty we see in culture, architecture and scenery was her reason for traveling to Istanbul,” her brother, David Jimenez, wrote on a website set up to sell his sister’s photography.

Among the photos for sale are Istanbul sunsets, and shots of Sierra’s beloved New York City.

By this afternoon, Jimenez put out another message saying, “Hey Instacanvas, Thank you for all the support in purchasing Sarai’s pictures. Quick update, all expenses for Sarai’s funeral have been paid for! From here on out any picture of hers that you purchase will NOT be going towards her funeral. All funds will be going to her children. Thank you for your support. David”

Sierra had been scheduled to arrive home at Newark Liberty International Airport on Jan. 22. When her husband, Steven Sierra, called the airline, he was told his wife never boarded the flight from Istanbul.

Steven Sierra and Jimenez traveled to Istanbul to aid in the search.

An intense two week search for for Sarai Sierra ended when her battered body was found.

An autopsy was completed Sunday, but results aren’t expected for three months. Turkish officials however said Sierra was killed by at least one fatal blow to her head.

A casket holding the Staten Island mother was taken to a Istanbul church Monday where it remains as Sierra’s family makes arrangements to bring her home.

Turkish police hope DNA samples from 21 people being questioned in the case will be key to finding the perpetrators, state media reported. A motive is not yet clear.

“They’re still investigating so they might think it might be a robbery, but they’re not sure,” said Betsy Jimenez, Sierra’s mother, said Monday.

The family also faces the heartbreaking task of telling Sierra’s two sons, ages 11 and 9, that their mother is dead.

The boys have been under the impression that their father has gone to Turkey to bring their mother home – alive.

“It’s going to be the hardest thing he’s ever going to have to do in his life,” said Rep. Michael Grimm, (R-NY) who added that the Staten Island family isn’t sure when Steven Sierra will be able to bring his wife’s body home.

ABC News’ Josh Haskell contributed to this report.

via Sarai Sierra’s Photos Become Big Sellers As Family Puts Them Online – ABC News.

February 6, 2013
Turkey says it knew group that bombed US embassy was planning an attack

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkish authorities suspected the outlawed leftist group that bombed the U.S. Embassy in Ankara was planning an attack, but did not have enough information to prevent it from happening, Turkey’s president said Monday.

The suicide bomber struck the U.S. Embassy on Friday, killing himself and a Turkish security guard and seriously wounding a former Turkish television journalist.

Turkish authorities said the bomber, Ecevit Sanli, was linked to the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, and the leftist group said it launched the attack to oppose U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

President Abdullah Gul said Turkish police and intelligence officials were on high alert about the DHKP-C, knowing it was planning an attack of some sort but didn’t know where or when.

“Our security and intelligence organizations knew the terror organization was seeking to carry out an attack; they were on alert and had warned everyone,” Gul said at a news conference. “But unfortunately it could not be prevented, and they carried out this attack against the U.S. Embassy.”

The U.S. Embassy resumed business on Monday, and a minute of silence was held for the 46-year-old Turkish guard who died in the attack.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news Agency said police have questioned 12 people in connection with the attack, including one who reportedly asked directions to Paris Street, where the side entrance to the embassy — the site of the attack — is located.

Quoting unidentified sources, Anadolu said Sanli posed as a courier, asked to be let in by showing an envelope, then detonated his explosives as soon as the gate to a security check point was opened.

Officials have said the bomber spent several years in prison on terrorism charges before being released on probation in 2001 after being diagnosed with a hunger-strike related disorder. They said he fled Turkey after his release.

During a visit to the Czech Republic on Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Sanli had been living in Germany and entered Turkey illegally to carry out the attack. Erdogan said it shows how important it is for Europe’s allies to work together in the battle against terrorism, and he complained that several European countries, including Germany and France, were not responding to Turkish requests for the extradition of militants wanted by Turkey.

“We are not getting the support we need,” Erdogan said. “Even those who have carried out the bloodiest of attacks are walking freely. Even though we present them with evidence, they are not being caught.”

“We can no longer tolerate this lack of interest,” Erdogan said.

For example, he accused France and Germany of ignoring Turkey’s requests to extradite Sakine Cansiz, who had helped found the Kurdistan Workers Party, a rebel group seeking autonomy for Turkey’s Kurds. She was one of three Kurdish activists who were gunned down in Paris last month.

DHKP-C has claimed responsibility for assassinations and bombings since the 1970s, but it has been relatively quiet in recent years. Compared to al-Qaida, it has not been seen as a strong terrorist threat.

In a statement posted on a website linked to the group, the DHKP-C said the United States was “responsible for every drop of blood shed all over the world” from “Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to Syria.”

It accused Erdogan’s government — which has become the Syrian regime’s strongest critic — of being a “lackey of the imperialists” by trying to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Friday’s attack on the U.S. Embassy occurred as NATO deployed six Patriot anti-missile systems to protect its ally Turkey from a possible spillover from Syria’s civil war. The U.S., Netherlands and Germany are each providing two Patriot batteries.

The suicide attack was the second deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in five months.

On Sept. 11, 2012, terrorists attacked a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The attackers in Libya were suspected to have ties to Islamist extremists, and one is in custody in Egypt.

U.S. diplomatic facilities in Turkey have been targeted previously by terrorists. In 2008, an attack blamed on al-Qaida-affiliated militants outside the U.S. Consulate.

via Turkey says it knew group that bombed US embassy was planning an attack | Fox News.

February 5, 2013
Turkey alerted to 3 terrorists still on the loose after Ankara blast

Photo: EPA

Turkey’s national security agency has been alerted to the possible presence of three suicide terrorists from the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) on the Turkish soil, following a blast outside the US embassy in Ankara on February 1.

According to the secret service, the four terrorists crossed into Turkey three months ago. They are all believed to be affiliated with the left-radical DHKP-C party.

Their Identikits have been sent to all state institutions. Turkish media earlier reported the terrorist who blew himself up near the US embassy was trained in Europe.

The Friday explosion ripped through the security point outside the US embassy in Ankara, killing a security guard and a civilian.

US embassy attacker was asylum applicant

The terrorist who blew himself up on Friday at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, tried to get political asylum in Germany about a year ago, according to German media.

The 40-year-old named Ecevit Shanli was a supporter of far left “Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front and Party.”

He attempted to obtain refugee status in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

During that time he was already under surveillance by the German intelligence services.

After the request was refused, German law enforcement lost his trail.

Shanli detonated an explosive device, mounted on his body at the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Visa Section of the U.S. Embassy in Turkey.

The blast killed the terrorist, a security guard and a civilian.

Voice of Russia, TASS

via Turkey alerted to 3 terrorists still on the loose after Ankara blast: Voice of Russia.

February 5, 2013
What’s Behind the Turkey Bombing? A Look at the DHKP-C

Feb 2, 2013 4:45 AM EST

Turkish officials named a long dormant terror group as responsible for Friday’s suicide attack at the U.S. embassy in Ankara. Why would the far-left group strike now?

When a suicide bomber at the U.S. embassy in Ankara detonated his charge on Friday, killing himself and a Turkish security guard, authorities looked beyond the usual terror suspects—al Qaeda or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK)—to finger an obscure group thought to have faded into obsolescence since its heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s.

The terrorist attack on the US Embassy in Ankara killed a security guard and wounded several others. (Yavuz Ozden/AFP/Getty)

According to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the attack was carried out by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C. Founded in the late ‘70s as a Marxist-Leninist group first known as Devrimci Solo, or Dev Sol, it advocated armed struggle to overthrow the Turkish government and replace it with socialism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the group softened its Marxist rhetoric and shifted its focus toward winning recruits among Turkey’s urban ghettos and the country’s notorious prisons, where, officials say, the DHKP-C ran de facto indoctrination and training camps.

The group—which has long been listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union, and the Turkish government—gained notoriety in the 1990s for its attacks on American targets, and for its gruesome hunger strikes during Turkey’s controversial prison reforms. In two of its most high-profile attacks, the DHKP-C assassinated two U.S. military contractors in a protest against the first Gulf War, and launched a rocket at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul in 1992. In the late ‘90s, authorities also thwarted plans by the group to launch rocket attacks against the U.S. consulate and Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where the U.S. had stationed forces to help patrol Iraq.

Even as it railed against America—a country it described in manifestos as “the total negation of democracy, justice, and freedom”—the group terrorized Turkey with a decade-long series of suicide bombings aimed at government targets. In one of the grisliest, in 2001, a suicide bomber linked to the DHKP-C killed himself and three policemen in Istanbul, wounding 30 others; the group claimed the attack was revenge for the death of 30 inmates who had resisted a move to a maximum-security prison and engaged in a firefight—fueled by smuggled weapons—with Turkish troops. Among the group’s other alleged or actual targets were Turkish soldiers, the Justice Ministry, onetime Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, and the heir to one of Turkey’s richest families, who was murdered alongside a business partner and a secretary by DHKP-C extremists in Toyota’s Istanbul headquarters in 1996.

Despite its high-profile acts of violence—which led then-CIA Director George Tenet to call out the group, along with Colombia’s FARC rebels and Hamas, in a 2002 report to Congress as a potential target for future American anti-terror operations—it has lost much of its influence in recent years. Turkish authorities and their European counterparts have cracked down on the group at home and abroad, effectively dismantling the group’s leadership and cutting off its funding sources. According to most experts, the DHKP-C’s membership has dwindled, along with its political influence—which makes it all the more bewildering that the group is now resurfacing in the Turkish news.

In January, Istanbul police announced an operation in seven cities that had detained 85 people accused of having links to the DHKP-C—including 11 lawyers accused of leaking state secrets to Greece and Syria. As noted by Michael Weiss, a Syria analyst and columnist with NOW Lebanon, the far left in Turkey has recently taken issue with the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles to defend the country against potential spillover from the conflict in Syria—one possible motivation for the embassy attack. He says Turkish authorities, locked in bitter animosity with Syria’s government over its neighbor’s brutal civil war, may be keen to press the Syria link in the coming days. “It is interesting that the target was the American embassy,” Weiss says. “Patriot missiles have just arrived in southern Turkey. And not two weeks ago, Istanbul police were claiming the DHKP-C lawyers had been detained on suspicion of giving state secrets to Syria and Greece. So there’s a strong likelihood that Turkish security will try to connect this attack to Damascus in some way.”

The group might still have enough strength left to cause more problems for the U.S. and Turkey, especially as the countries struggle to deal with the chaos across the border in Syria.

But Ross Wilson, the American ambassador to Turkey from 2005-08, interprets the attacks as a last gasp in a dying breed of Turkish leftist terror. He says the group has been weakened considerably over the years, and may have staked out such a high-profile target in a bid to get attention—as well as in retaliation for the recent arrests by Turkish authorities. “There have been protests against the Patriots, and there is a strain in Turkey of virulent anti-Americanism, of the kind that turns out to protest whenever we do anything,” says Wilson, who now directs the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. “I think the DHKP-C may be trying to get back into the business here—but their agenda is not just opposing Patriots, but [it is] extreme violence and murder. That worked in the 1970s and ‘80s, but Turkey has really moved on from those left-right battles.”

Still, the group might still have enough strength left to cause more problems for the U.S. and Turkey, especially as the countries struggle to deal with the chaos across the border in Syria. “If the DHKP-C, whose hallmark is threatening U.S. interests in Turkey, is indeed behind this attack, it suggests to me that—as small as this and similar groups are,” says Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “they will pose a continued risk to further U.S.-NATO deployments in Turkey.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/02/what-s-behind-the-turkey-bombing-a-look-at-the-dhkp-c.html

February 3, 2013
Missing US tourist ‘found dead’ in Turkey

Police found Ms Sierra’s body near Istanbul’s ancient city walls

A US woman who disappeared last month while on holiday in Turkey has been found dead in Istanbul, reports say.

The body of Sarai Sierra was discovered near the the city’s ancient walls, Turkish media report.

Police have arrested nine people in connection with the case, the state-run Anadolu agency says.

The 33-year-old mother of two from New York had been missing since 21 January, the day before she was due to arrive back in New York City.

She had left for Turkey two weeks earlier and made short trips to the Netherlands and Germany, the Associated Press(AP) reports.

Police had released security camera footage showing Ms Sierra at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport before she flew to Amsterdam.

Her body is reported to have been found close to the Galata Bridge, a popular tourist site spanning Istanbul’s Golden Horn waterway.

Undated file photo of Sarai Sierra The mother of two went missing one day before she was due to arrive back in the US

Shortly before her disappearance, Ms Sierra had allegedly told her family that she planned to visit the bridge.

Although police have not yet commented on the case, reports say the American may have been stabbed to death.

Andalou says she may have been killed at a different location before her body was hidden near the city walls.

The US embassy in Ankara had been working with Turkish authorities to help track down the missing woman.

Police in Istanbul set up a special unit to find Ms Sierra, AP says.

Her husband and her brother had also travelled to Istanbul to join the search.

The case attracted extensive media coverage in Turkey where the disappearance of tourists is rare.

via BBC News – Missing US tourist ‘found dead’ in Turkey.

February 3, 2013
Profile: Turkey’s Marxist DHKP-C

Turkey’s extreme-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) has waged a violent campaign for more than three decades.

Ankara says the DHKP-C has killed dozens of police officers and soldiers along with more than 80 civilians since it was formed in 1978.

The banned group wants to replace the Turkish government with a Marxist one.

It also opposes what it calls US imperialism and has several times targeted US military personnel and diplomatic missions.

The DHKP-C is branded as a terror organisation by the US and the EU.

The group has claimed a suicide attack against the US embassy in Ankara which killed the bomber and a guard on 1 February 2013.

During the previous month, Turkish police made more than 80 arrests in raids targeting the group.

Among those detained were students, lawyers, reporters and even members of a pop group who were thought to have links with the DHKP-C.

The group was formed in 1978 as Dev-Sol (Revolutionary Left), a Marxist-Leninist splinter group from a larger group called Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path). It changed its name to DHKP-C in 1994.

In its early years the group recruited supporters mainly in high schools and universities.

But analysts say its main power-base is among the urban poor.

In 2000, the group spearheaded a long-running hunger strike in Turkish prisons over the introduction of high-security jails.

More than 60 people died in the prison protest, most of them DHKP-C members. Another 30 inmates were killed when the army stormed prisons in December 2000 to end the campaign.

The group has been blamed for the killings of two retired generals, a former justice minister and a prominent businessman.

Experts say that during the 2000s the DHKP-C tried to gain prominence by imitating the tactics of al-Qaeda.

But many of its senior figures fled abroad following Turkish police raids in 2004.

The group’s founding leader Dursun Karatas spent years in exile after escaping from an Istanbul prison in 1989. He died of cancer in the Netherlands 2008.

via BBC News – Profile: Turkey’s Marxist DHKP-C.

February 3, 2013