Last 7 June, parliamentary elections were held in Turkey, but since then no party has managed to form a government, not even a coalition one. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan therefore decided to send Turks back to the polls on 1 November in an attempt to break the political deadlock. Who could have imagined that the deadlock would receive a heavy blow from the worst attack in the country's history, which saw 97 people killed following the explosion of two bombs on Saturday 10 October in the capital Ankara. All this while left-wing trade unions, the medical association and the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) were demonstrating against the resumption of hostilities in the south-east of the country between the Turkish army and the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) — the entity that has fought for years for the independence of Anatolian Kurdistan and for the creation of a "greater Kurdistan" that would also include regions under Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian sovereignty. For this reason it has been placed on the list of terrorist organisations by both the United States (1997) and the European Union (2002).

A battle on two fronts

It is not yet clear who is responsible for the attack, but interim Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu pointed the finger at the Islamic State (Isis) terrorist group or at the PKK itself, which was severely "hit" by the attack. The latter hypothesis is evidently improbable, but it confirms the two fronts on which the government is engaged: one international and one domestic. The Kurdish question, however, is the true fulcrum of the Turkish political crisis, because for the first time in thirteen years Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) failed to win a majority in the 7 June elections, while for the first time a Kurdish party, the HDP, surpassed the 10 per cent threshold (the highest in the world), becoming the third-largest force in the Turkish parliament.

For this reason, many Kurds believe that the attack was organised by the intelligence services together with nationalists to fuel the so-called "strategy of tension" and to hope for an armed reaction from the PKK that would cast the Kurds — and therefore the HDP — in a bad light ahead of the upcoming elections. The end of the truce between the Turkish army and the PKK was sealed, as it happens, on the occasion of another attack, the one in Suruç, which caused the deaths of 32 young people whose only crime was trying to contribute to the reconstruction of the Syrian city that became a symbol of the clashes between the Kurdish population and the Islamic State: Kobane. From July to the present day, the conflict between the Turkish army and Kurdish peshmerga (guerrillas) has caused more than 1,500 deaths.

The origins of the dream of a "greater Kurdistan"

The struggle between the PKK and the Ankara government has very deep roots. After the end of the First World War, the victorious allies promised the creation of an independent Kurdish state through the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), later repudiated by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which divided the region among no fewer than four states (Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria). In 1983, Massoud Barzani — the current president of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan — and the then Turkish president Turgut Özal signed a non-interference agreement. In 1993, with the death of Özal, the hope of a negotiated solution between the parties also died. PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested in 1999 and imprisoned on the Turkish island of İmralı, where he is still held in complete isolation today. Recent history has seen a succession of truces and resumptions of hostilities that now involve a third actor as well: the Islamic State.

Erdoğan must choose

The emergence of Isis in the Kurdish region developed in parallel with the chaos in Syria. Kobane hosted the most violent clashes of the Syrian civil war and transformed the Kurds into a symbol of resistance against the expansion of the extremist group. Despite this, Turkey — and Russia and the Western powers too — did not officially support the peshmerga, leaving them almost entirely alone in this battle against Islamic extremism. A solitude that confirms the ambivalence in Erdoğan's stance: on the one hand, he is intent on making clear — ahead of the November parliamentary elections — that the AKP is still the only party capable of maintaining and restoring domestic stability; on the other, he is forced to show a firm hand against Isis as well, all the more so should it be confirmed that it was indeed two Islamic State suicide bombers who brought the war to the Turkish capital.