Something we think most people don't know about Turkey...

(Justin) I considered myself knowledgeable and well-read about Turkey before moving here. But something I never appreciated was the daily death toll of the country in a fight against terrorism. I hesitate to write about it (My observation is that expat Turkey bloggers steer clear of the subject.), but it's something that is in the news every day and increasingly agitates those around us.

For example, today, a national holiday, multiple attacks took place. In Gaziantep this evening, a truck bomb killed 8 and wounded 60. Earlier in the day three soldiers were killed by a landmine. These have been almost daily occurrences this year. Last week, a member of parliament was even kidnapped by guerrillas. The evening news highlights the funerals, which are not pleasant to watch. In response, the army has recently launched large operations with aerial bombardments. The numbers of terrorists killed are often highlighted as well but feel a lot less personal than the Turkish losses where the funerals will be on every major network.

In America, we lose about 300 soldiers annually in Afghanistan and it hurts everyone emotionally, and we look forward to when the troops will come home. In Turkey, the losses are on their home soil. I won't get into the complexities, and I have no idea what a viable solution could be. (It would be similar to certain Native American tribes taking up arms in the U.S., demanding a new division of the land, and having those arms supplied by groups in Mexico and elsewhere. It creates quite the tension between people groups.)

In Ankara, we're far away from the fighting (mostly the southeastern provinces) but sometimes it hits close to home when there is a bomb scare, or there is an attack in another major city (Izmir last week). Ankara is pretty international - on the bus I'm as likely to hear Arabic or Farsi or English as I am Kurdish - so we're insulated from the tension that exists in many other cities. But you can't avoid it in the news and you can't avoid it on the faces and tweets of those watching the news.

I write this just to acknowledge that the problem is big and largely unseen in Western media. (Events unfolding in Syria also have an effect on Turkey's internal struggles, and this gets neglected in Western reporting.)  In Turkish, they say "Başınız sağ olsun" to someone who has lost a loved one, literally meaning "May your head be right/whole." We express that sentiment to the people of Turkey who are again reading such bitter news tonight, on what should have been a happy holiday.