EU Talks Vs Homegrown Terrorists.

The Kurds in Turkey want autonomy in a federal system as the one being developed in Iraq. This is opposed by the Kemalist order as a whole and by the military in particular, while Erdogan's government of moderate Islamists is determined to secure full EU membership even at the expense of granting some degree of Kurdish autonomy. This will raise the risk of a military-backed coup in Ankara. It will embolden the Kurds to demand more and, if the military have their way, risk homegrown Salafi terrorism that would threaten the EU as a whole.

The threat of homegrown terrorism lingers from the November 2003 bombings which killed 61 people in four attacks in Istanbul on two synagogues, the British consulate and the Turkey HQ of HSBC. A local Salafi group linked to Al-Qaeda claimed credit. Fears of a fresh wave of Salafi violence followed a March 9, 2004 bomb attack on a Masonic lodge in Istanbul. Gov. Muammer Guler then said there was no evidence to link the deadly attack to the November 2003 bombings, which injured more than 600. There were bomb attacks on two small hotels in Istanbul and an LPG plant on Aug. 10, 2004, which killed two people and wounded 11. A Qaeda-linked group claimed credit. Airports in Turkey in July 2004 were placed on alert after intelligence that Al-Qaeda was planning attacks similar to 9/11. Milliyet said officials had a warning that Al-Qaeda may hijack a plane to crash it into a target or detonate a device on board a plane.

What Turkish counter-terrorist experts are learning about the July 7 Salafi underground and bus bombings in London seems to confirm their worst fears. Three of the four men who set off those devastating, deadly explosions, as suicide bombers, were British nationals raised in the UK and descended from Pakistani families.

The fourth suicide bomber involved in the London attacks of July 7 was born in Jamaica and was reported to have spent much of his life in the Caribbean, along with six years in Cleveland as a youth.

Stricter border controls or pressure on foreign governments could not have stopped these suicide bombers. One of them is said to have visited a Salafi religious madrassa in Pakistan last year.

Suicide bombers, whether in Iraq, Turkey or in Europe, are frightening. Their pathological hatred was sown not in a desert jihadi madrassa but in suburban West Yorkshire. An explosive is not any more deadly because the person who carries it chooses to blow himself up with his victims. It is harder to stop a killer who has no concerns about being caught after the crime.

Suicide bombing requires a level of fanatacism which people find especially threatening. These killers are almost impossible to deter or intercept, since no accomplices have to be recruited and no get-away plans are needed.

It does not take many such people to put modern societies at risk. And the descriptions of the bombers as young men who were, until recently, average members of a community with no known ties to jihadis, will make life more difficult for all the normal young Muslims in Europe, or in Turkey, who may now find themselves being examined with hard-eyed scrutiny when they enter a bus or a metro.