TUESDAY’s terrorist attack on Istanbul’s international airport highlights both Turkey’s worsening security situation and the militant Islamic State group’s strategy to destabilise the strategically located Nato country.

Even though Ankara’s civilian airport had seen a minor terrorist attack last December, this is for the first time that Ataturk airport, one of the world’s busiest, has been subjected to a dual suicide bombing and gun attack that left over 40 people dead and some 240 injured.

Separatist Kurds have also been involved in recent attacks, but Tuesday’s carnage seems to fall in line with IS’s strategy to cripple Turkey’s tourist industry — on Jan 12, a Syrian suicide-bomber killed 12 German tourists in Istanbul.

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “much worse things could happen” unless “all governments and the entire mankind joined forces in the fight against terrorism”.

With the five-year multilateral war in its south showing no signs of ending, the IS challenge is one of the many crises Turkey faces in a part of the world where terrorism, sectarian conflicts and civil wars have thrown into doubt the very survival of some states.

Tuesday’s atrocity comes a day after Tehran reported the death of 14 Iranian troops and Kurdish militants in a clash.

The skirmish took place on the Iraq-Iran border; however, it highlights Turkey’s own decades-old Kurdish insurgency, which has not only revived but seems to have gained strength after Kurdish fighters occupied a sliver of Syrian territory along the Turkish border.

Turkey has also been dealing with the flood of Syrian refugees with its consequent fallout on Ankara’s relations with the European Union.

In this vortex of military, diplomatic and humanitarian crises, Turkey has to decide which side it is on.

The Syrian war is a multilateral conflict, but it often appears President Erdogan’s government looks at it through its Kurdish prism and believes in a ‘get Assad first’ philosophy. What it must not forget is that President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster is no guarantee of a peaceful, ‘normal’ Syria and that the fall of the Baathist regime could find IS better positioned in Turkey’s underbelly.

Also, Ankara is grossly mistaken if it thinks IS could help it sort the Kurds out; it should know that IS does not believe in any alliances; it believes in a kill-all philosophy which considers death and destruction an end in themselves. It is time Ankara clarified its thinking and made the right choice.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2016