Ankara

On Friday, the EU and Turkey came to an agreement on a set of proposals to stem the flow of Mid-East asylum seekers into Western Europe.

The focus of the discussions in Brussels was cutting off the sea route to Greece. On the front lines is the Greek island Lesbos where at least half of the 144,000 refugees who have entered Greece in 2016 have landed. More than a million people crossed the Aegean to Greece last year.

For the fourth time this year and the second time in seven days, one of Turkey’s major cities has been hit with a deadly suicide bombing.

Just six days after an explosion ripped through a transit hub in Ankara’s Kizilay neighborhood killing 34 people and wounding more than 100, a bustling shopping street in Istanbul was shaken by a powerful blast on Saturday.

It was just a month ago when Ankara was rocked by a blast triggered when a military vehicle passed a car laden with explosives. Dozens of people were killed. 

That, in turn, came shortly after a January attack in Istanbul, where a suicide bomber detonated in a public square, killing several German tourists. 

In the lead up to elections last June that saw Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling AKP lose their absolute majority in Parliament, Turkey had long been criticized for not doing enough to assist in the fight against ISIS.

The recent carnage in Ankara comes at a good time for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has been demanding that the United States and other NATO allies support him in his war against the Kurds of Syria, who are, incidentally, regarded as allies by Washington in the war against ISIS. The Turks have been bombarding Kurdish positions and staging special ops raids, warning the Kurds against the dangers of becoming too successful in their drive to occupy territory vacated by a retreating ISIS.