Suicide blast kills tourists, mostly Germans, in Istanbul

Latest update : 2016-01-13

A suicide bomber, who is believed to have entered Turkey from Syria, blew himself up in the heart of Istanbul’s historic tourist district Tuesday, killing at least 10 people, mostly German tourists.

The blast ripped Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square, near the iconic Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia -- among the world’s most visited tourist sites -- around 10:20am local time.

'GERMANY IN SHOCK'

Witnesses reported hearing a loud blast at the square, and video footage showed police and ambulances at the scene shortly after the attack.

“I was in my office on the third floor and I heard the explosion,” said Ismet Bogan, who works in a travel agency located near Sultanahmet Square, in an interview with FRANCE 24. “We couldn’t go out right away because there could have been a second explosion. After around ten minutes, I went out and Turkish police had sealed off the square.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attack in a speech to Turkish ambassadors in the capital, Ankara, which was broadcast live on national TV.

"I condemn the terror incident in Istanbul, assessed to be an attack by a suicide bomber with Syrian origin," said Erdogan.

For further coverage, see Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the Islamic State (IS) group was responsible for the suicide attack. He identified the 10 victims as foreign tourists, mostly German nationals.

Davutoglu said he spoke to German Chancellor Angela Merkel hours after the attack and had expressed his condolences.

A Peruvian national was also killed and another wounded in the attack, according to the Peruvian Foreign Ministry.

There were no official figures of the number of wounded although Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said two of the injured were in serious condition

Conflicting reports on origins of attacker

Reporting from Istanbul, FRANCE 24’s Jasper Mortimer said Turkish authorities had identified the suicide bomber as “a Syrian man who would have turned 28 this year. Turkish officials say there is a high probability he worked for the Islamic State group, and of the three militant groups operating in Turkey at the moment, it is the Islamic State group that has been carrying out most of the bombings in public places recently.”

A number of militant groups operate in Turkey, including the Kurdish PKK group and the Marxist-Leninist DHKP-C.

So far no militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Previous attacks believed to have been conducted by the IS group, including a deadly October 10 attack in Ankara, have not been officially claimed by the IS group.

Hours after Tuesday's attack, there were conflicting reports surrounding the origin and nationality of the suicide bomber.

Erdogan and other senior Turkish officials identified the attacker as a Syrian national. However, leading Turkish daily, Hurriyet, identified the bomber as Saudi-born Nabil Fadli.

According to Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Kurtulmus, the suicide bomber is believed to have recently entered Turkey from Syria and was not on Turkey's watch list of suspected militants.

Kurtulmus said thousands of people were being tracked for suspected militant links but the bomber was not one of them.

Turkey takes on the IS group

Monday’s suicide bombing was the latest in a series of attacks, attributed to the IS group, that have ripped Turkey in recent months, including the October 2014 Ankara bombing, which killed 100 people.

Following an initial reluctance by Ergodan’s government to restrict the movement of Islamist fighters across the 900-kilometre Turkish-Syrian border, Ankara has closed the border and is taking a more active role in the coalition fight against the IS group.Turkey has also granted the international coalition access to its Incirlik base, a move that has put the country in the IS group’s crosshairs.

“Things have changed,” noted Wassim Nasr, FRANCE 24’s expert on jihadist groups. “Turkey is fighting the Islamic State group along with the coalition and a lot of the propaganda material put out by the Islamic State group feature Turkish jihadis threatening to conduct operations in Turkey, calling the Turkish population to rise against Erdogan, who is called Taghut,” said Nasr, using a term in jihadist discourse for someone who has crossed the line or rebelled.

The attack has raised fears of further damage to Turkey’s tourism industry, which has already been hit by a diplomatic row between Ankara and Moscow following the Turkish downing of a Russian plane by the Syrian border.

“The tourism industry has already suffered a lot this year,” said Mortimer. “While walking to Sultanahmet Square, which is surrounded by shops and restaurants, I saw no customers in the shops, and shopkeepers and restaurant owners were sitting by their doors with very long faces.”

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

Hollande looks to new laws to turn France around in 2016

With France still in the economic doldrums and recovering from a series of terrorist attacks, President François Hollande has his work cut out for him as he introduces a raft of new legislation in the hope that 2016 will be a year of progress.

Ending the state of emergency, but making it easier to enact

Hollande’s immediate task will be to extricate France from the state of emergency enacted after theNovember 13 terrorist attacks in Paris in which 130 people were killed in the deadliest attack on French soil since the Second World War.

The state of emergency was extended by parliament for three months at the end of November.

It is due to expire on February 26, but before then, Hollande has promised to write into the French constitution a provision that will allow a state of emergency to be imposed more easily. A vast majority of French lawmakers are expected to support this move.

Both the constitutional amendment and the state of emergency itself have been controversial in a country that has not imposed such a drastic measure since the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s.

INTERIOR MINISTER DEFENDS SECURITY MEASURES

Of particular concern was the use of the state of emergency to prevent demonstrations and to impose temporary stay-at-home orders for environmentalist militants and trade unions during December’s COP21 climate talks in Paris.

Despite profiting from imposing such a tough measure, Hollande will be keen to avoid any notion of heading towards a “permanent state of emergency”, which would undermine the legitimacy of the French state.

Stripping terrorists of French citizenship

A much bigger legislative challenge for Hollande will be to follow through with his promise to strip dual citizens of their French nationality if they have been “definitively convicted” of terrorist offences.

The measure, announced in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, took the wind out of the sails of the conservative and far-right opposition, which has been calling for just such a law (the far-right National Front has claimed it is at the origin of the idea).

But this largely symbolic measure, supported by 90% of the population, is already foundering.

On Monday, Socialist lawmakers complained that any such law would drive a gap between French citizens and the estimated five percent of them with dual nationality.

Socialist Party Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, while supporting the measure, said it should be applied to “any French citizen” convicted of terrorist offences. Bruno Le Roux, who heads the Socialist group in the National Assembly, also said it should apply to all citizens “whether or not they have dual nationality”.

However, France’s obligations under international law prevent it from leaving any individual stateless, leaving any compromise meaningless and unenforceable.

Some 70 human rights and anti-racist organizations and unions have launched a petition to reject the measure outright.

Socialist Senator Samia Ghali warned that such a law, which has echoes of Vichy France stripping foreigners and Jews of their French citizenship during World War II, could be open to abuse.

The constitutional change, to be debated in Parliament from the beginning of February, requires a three-fifths majority vote from lawmakers. Getting this majority is by no means assured.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has defended the proposal, calling it “a strong symbolic act that punishes those who exclude themselves from the national community, nothing more, nothing less".

Pulling France out of the economic doldrums

“We may have a state of emergency on the security front, but we are also in an economic and social state of emergency,” Hollande said as 2015 drew to a close.

Indeed, unemployment has been Hollande’s most enduring headache since he was elected in 2012.

With just 16 months to go before the next presidential election Hollande, whose popularity has foundered on record levels of joblessness (currently at just over 10%), has said he will not stand for re-election in 2017 unless he can reverse the downward spiral of unemployment.

Measures to stimulate hiring include a bonus, put in place in June 2015 for a period of one year, of 4,000 euros per employee to companies offering permanent contracts and temporary contracts of over 12 months. Further help for French small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are expected in the form of reduced employment taxes, although exactly by how much remains unknown.

Hollande has also proposed to put 500,000 jobseekers into training, a programme that will cost an estimated one billion euros. Proposals on where the funding will come from, and how any such scheme will work, are expected at the end of January.

A bane of French employers are France’s strict employment laws, which protect workers on permanent contracts while making it difficult – and extremely expensive – to lay workers off.

This law is due for an overhaul and will be debated between March and May. While its author, Employment Minister Myriam El Khomri, will appease employers by suggesting a cap on redundancy payments, there is little indication that it will change the huge protections enjoyed by employees.

The environment as a driver for growth – and political cohesion on the left

The COP21 climate talks which began at the end of November were a resounding success, albeit overshadowed by the November 13 attacks and the state of emergency that followed, as well as regional elections that saw a worrying shift to the far-right.

Hollande said on New Year’s Eve that he was keen to capitalize on the success: “France has a responsibility to put in place what was agreed for the planet, and even to take a lead and to set an example.”

Measures, which will be announced in March following parliamentary approval for changes to the constitution, will include “large-scale projects to renovate existing buildings, for the development of renewable energy and for environmental projects to become a driver for economic growth”.

According to one (unnamed) minister, quoted by left-leaning daily Libération, launching such projects could reap considerable political dividends.

“The environment is a debate that has the potential to unite the left, well beyond the [ruling] Socialists,” the minister said referring to other left-wing parties including the Communists and EELV Green Party.

“This will put the left well ahead of [conservative former president] Nicolas Sarkozy [who plans to stand for president in 2017] who is not seen as being concerned about the environment,” the minister added. “This will be the opportunity to do some real politics.”

Sweden, Denmark impose stricter border controls to stem migrant influx

All train, bus and ferry passengers traveling from Denmark to Sweden will from Monday be required to show photo identification before being allowed across the border in a drastic move by the Swedish government to stem an unprecedented migrant influx.

Denmark imposed temporary identity checks on its border with Germany on Monday
following a similar move by Sweden, dealing a double blow to Europe's fraying passport-free Schengen area amid a record influx of migrants.

Sweden began checking documents of travellers from Denmark on Monday for the first time in half a century, causing delays of up to 50 minutes for trains and buses crossing the 4.9 mile (7.9 km) Oresund Bridge, Europe's longest combined road and rail bridge. However private vehicles were exempt from the checks.

Denmark's prime minister said Sweden's move gave his country no option but to impose its own border controls and he appealed to the European Union to take "collective decisions" to better protect its external borders against the tide of migrants.

"The Swedish ID checks can increase the risk of a large number of illegal immigrants to accumulate in and around Copenhagen," Lars Lokke Rasmussen told a news conference in Copenhagen, justifying the new controls on the German border.

Last year some 163,000 refugees sought asylum in Sweden, the largest number for any EU country relative to its population. But with arrivals running at around 10,000 a week in November, mostly travelling through Denmark, the Swedish government has said it is time to tighten border controls and asylum rules.

"A dark day for our Nordic region," former centre-right Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said on his Twitter feed on Monday to describe the imposition of border checks.

Thousands of commuters daily use the Oresund Bridge - familiar to fans of the 'Nordic noir' crime drama series "The Bridge" - to shuttle by car, train and bus between the Danish capital Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo.

Travellers expressed dismay at the new checks.

"I paid 230 euros for these tickets. This is Europe, not Africa. Why these checks?" said Gezahegn Abebe, an Ethiopian migrant living in Norway as he stood in the train station by Copenhagen airport before trying to head to Sweden.

Returning home from a visit to Germany, Abebe said he had not been allowed through by security guards when he showed his Norwegian residence permit. Unlike Sweden and Denmark, Norway is not in the EU but it is a member of the Schengen zone.

"They said this is not a passport. If you don't have a passport you can't go," Abebe said.

Breaking point

More than one million migrants fleeing conflicts and poverty in the Middle East and beyond sought shelter in Europe in 2015 and many more are expected to come during 2016.

The unprecedented numbers have strained to breaking point the EU's free movement policy and its attempts to create a single economic area, with several countries temporarily re-introducing border controls.

Rasmussen said the Danish border controls would last for 10 days but could be extended.

Officials in Germany, which itself is struggling to absorb about a million migrants who arrived during 2015, said they were paying close attention to the new Danish border checks and their possible impact on the northward flow of migrants into Denmark.

Sweden has long been proud of its self-proclaimed status as a 'humanitarian superpower' and its decision in November to tighten border controls and asylum rules came close to bringing down Prime Minister Stefan Lofven's minority coalition
government of Social Democrats and Greens.

Norway swiftly followed Sweden's lead and has announced 40 proposals to tighten asylum rules.

ID-free travel within the Nordic region - long a popular magnet for migrants due to its high standards of living and generous social welfare benefits - dates back long before the Schengen accord to the 1950s, when Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland signed a passport union.

Around 15,000 commuters cross the strait between Sweden and Denmark every day and there are worries that businesses in Sweden's Skane region and in Copenhagen will be hit.

Denmark's state-owned rail operator said the ID controls would cost it nearly 1 million Danish crowns ($147,000) a day.

Danish employers fear fewer Swedes will want to cross the bridge to work in Denmark as a result of the new rules.

"Already now the lack of workers is a problem and if the Swedes do not want to work here due to a longer commute, the problem will be even bigger," Pernille Knudsen, Vice Chief Executive of the Confederation of Danish Employers, told Danish newspaper Borsen.

"The Swedish border control is a potential killer of growth for the Danish economy."

(AFP)

Islamic State group claims deadly shooting in Dagestan

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© Ilyas Haji, AFP | The December 29 attack occurred near the historic ancient fortress in Derbent, Dagestan.

Text by NEWS WIRES

Latest update : 2015-12-31

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a shooting at an ancient citadel in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region of Dagestan that killed one and injured 11, the SITE Intelligence Group said.

"With the help of Allah, the warriors of the Khalifate were able to attack a group of Russian special service officers in the city of Derbent in southern Dagestan, killing one officer and injuring the others," the jihadist monitoring organisation SITE quoted IS as saying on Wednesday.

The deadly attack took place on Tuesday night near the citadel of Derbent, which claims to be Russia's oldest city, and which this year celebrated its 2,000th anniversary.

Islamist rebels in Dagestan, a restive region just east of Chechnya, have been increasingly flocking to join IS, which in June declared it had established a franchise there.

Syria's Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front had called on jihadists from the Caucasus to perpetrate attacks in Russia in response to Moscow's bombing campaign in the country.

The shooting took place as Russian warplanes wrapped up two days of intensive bombing raids over Syria, carrying out 121 sorties in which they hit 424 targets, the military announced on Wednesday.

The attack targeted Russian security forces, with an unnamed source telling RIA Novosti state news agency that a member of the Federal Security Service (FSB) had been killed and another injured in the shooting.

The gunmen, who were reportedly in the forest, opened fire at people standing by the fortress, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.

Sixty-seven bullet casings were recovered at the scene, a law enforcement source told Interfax news agency on Wednesday.

Located on the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea, Derbent served as a strategic port city at the crossroads of empires and was incorporated into the Russian empire in the 19th century.

The Kremlin is currently fighting a deadly insurgency against Islamist rebels in the largely Muslim North Caucasus, with unrest particularly intense in Dagestan.

At least 118 people were killed there between January and November as a result of the conflict, according to the Caucasian Knot news portal, which monitors militancy in the North Caucasus.

Moscow has said part of the reason why it began operating over Syria was to prevent IS jihadists and other extremists from perpetrating attacks on Russian soil.

According to FSB figures released earlier this month, nearly 2,900 Russians are fighting or have fought with the extremist jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

(AFP)
 

What would happen in a region ruled by France's far-right?

The far-right's rising star Marion Marechal-Le Pen might well walk up the steps of the world-famous Cannes Film Festival in southeast France next spring as leader of the region, if she wins elections there on Sunday.

Her National Front (FN) pulled off a historic win last weekend, topping the vote in the first round of regional polls, in a breakthrough that shook up the country's political
landscape before 2017 presidential elections.

If it wins one or more regions in Sunday's run-off, that would be a first for the party, leaving the French public and much of the wider world to contemplate: what would happen in a region ruled by the far-right?

The anti-Europe, anti-immigration party certainly plans measures to please its grassroots supporters; regional subsidies to charities helping migrants would be axed, for example, while schools would be restricted in offering alternatives to pork in their canteens.

Marechal-Le Pen - who is more conservative than her aunt, FN leader Marine Le Pen - has said she would scrap aid to family-planning organisations.

The actions of FN politicians who became town mayors last year might also offer clues - David Rachline took down the EU flag from the front of Frejus town hall in southeastern France, while Steeve Briois ended the practice of giving a human rights
group free use of municipal premises of Henin-Beaumont in the north.

But any changes are likely to be largely symbolic. The FN aims to use any regional wins as a platform in its quest for national power in 2017 - so it will not seek to implement its national manifesto, but rather seek to prove it can responsibly govern large constituencies, and offer stability.

"The key word will be pragmatism, not ideology," Marine Le Pen told a last campaign rally on Thursday evening, after opinion polls showed her party's prospects have waned since the first round and that tactical voting could keep it out of power in its key target regions.

Since Le Pen took the FN over from her maverick, ex-paratrooper father Jean-Marie in 2011, she has strived to build a base of locally elected officials to help "de-demonise" the party and target the 2017 national elections.

"High schools will still be built, trains will still run, vocational training will still be carried out," political analyst Joel Gombin, a specialist of the far-right, said of the French regions' main areas of responsibility.

"But to attract attention and strengthen their political hold they are set to carry out symbolic decisions that cost nothing but are highly visible. They will stage the 'FN against the system' line," he said.

'Respect the law'

While regional councils have no direct powers over France's migration policy, the FN's top candidates have said they would act the only way they can at that level, by putting an end to any subsidies for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that help migrants.

"It makes no sense economically that public money goes to help foreign workers and migrants in a region where unemployment is higher than national average," Marechal-Le Pen told Reuters in an interview last month.

She said she would also scrap development aid subsidies and use the money instead to boost exports for French firms. Along the same lines, her aunt Marine's electoral leaflets deride the northern France region's financing of schools in Africa, calling them "unbelievable" examples of wasted money.

Marechal-Le Pen has also said that she would stop subsidies to family-planning charities, which she accuses of being politicised and of promoting abortion.

But while symbolically significant, such subsidies are but a small share of regional budgets.

A detailed list of the subsidies handed out last year by the Provence-Alpes-Cotes-d'Azur region where Marechal-Le Pen is the main FN candidate shows about 68,000 euros ($75,000) of subsidies to three migrant workers' associations. And about
190,000 euros went to NGOs that advise women on issues such as contraception and abortion.

That's out of a total annual budget of around 2.2 billion euros for that region.

In the northern France region where Le Pen is a candidate, for each 100 euros of the region's budget this year, 65 go to transport, schools and vocational training, 5 to economic development, 5 to subsidies, 4 to culture and 2 to sports. The rest goes to various other projects.

Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said this week she was worried about what would happen to high schools if the FN won regional power. Regions have no power over the curriculum but are in charge of everything else, from maintaining buildings
to organising canteens.

Vallaud-Belkacem said she feared debates over school canteen food would resurface - with the issue of whether alternatives should be offered when pork is on the menu - and worried FN-led regions could discriminate against non-French children.

Le Pen's 115 page-long programme for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region says French secularism would be "strictly implemented". Schools that currently do not offer
alternative menus should not introduce them, according to the plan. Those that do should only be allowed to continue doing so if there are "nutritional reasons", it says, without elaborating.

But the FN will not go further than such steps, party officials and analysts said, as it is keen not to repeat the mistakes made in the 1990s, when illegal measures such as one municipality giving handouts only to European children were struck down by courts and damaged the party's credibility.

"We will absolutely respect the law until we are in government at the national level and can change it," said Marechal-Le Pen.

Russian destroyer 'fires warning shots' at Turkish ship

A Russian destroyer in the Aegean Sea on Sunday used small arms fire to prevent a collision with a Turkish vessel, Moscow said, adding it had summoned Ankara's military attache over the incident.

"The crew of the Russian patrol ship Smetlivy which was located 22 kilometres (13.7 miles) from the Greek island of Lemnos in the northern part of the Aegean Sea avoided collision with a Turkish seiner," the defence ministry said, adding that the crew had fired small arms to warn the boat.

At 0603 GMT the Russian warship, which was at anchor, spotted a Turkish fishing boat some 1,000 metres away, the defence ministry said, adding the boat had been approaching it from the right.

"Despite numerous attempts by the Smetlivy, the crew of the Turkish seiner would not engage in radio contact and did not respond to special visual signals," the ministry added.

Moscow said the crew had to fire small arms in the direction of the boat at "a guaranteed survivability distance" when there were some 600 metres between the two vessels "to prevent the collision of the ships."

"Immediately after that the Turkish vessel drastically changed course and continued its movement past the Smetlivy at the distance of 540 metres without engaging in contact with the Russian crew," the ministry said.

Deputy defence minister Anatoly Antonov summoned a Turkish military attache, it added.

The latest incident came after Turkey downed a Russian bomber at the Syrian border in November, leading to the biggest crisis in ties between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.

After the downing of the warplane, which led to the deaths of a pilot and another serviceman who attempted to rescue him, Russia introduced economic sanctions against Turkey and beefed up its firepower at its airbase in Syria.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday delivered a thinly veiled warning to Ankara and told his forces in Syria to take tough action against any threats.

"I would like to warn those who would once again try to organise some sort of provocations against our servicemen," Putin said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Friday that Ankara's patience with Moscow after the downing of the warplane was "not unlimited", urging Moscow to react calmly.