Kurds Threaten Turkish Tourism

If Abdullah Ocalan's capture was designed to snuff out Turkey's Kurdish insurgency, the result appears to have been the opposite. Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) announced Monday that it would launch attacks against Turkey's $7 billion-a-year tourism industry, and warned foreigners to stay away. The announcement came on the heels of a Saturday attack in which Ocalan supporters firebombed an Istanbul shopping mall, killing 13 people. A car bomb exploded in the city Monday, and a second device was defused at a Burger King outlet. Nine days earlier, four people were killed in a car bomb attack by a leftist Kurdish splinter group in central Turkey.

"The Turkish government thought they could deal with this problem by eliminating Ocalan, but they're facing a multi-headed hydra," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "Responding effectively to a nationalist movement or a terrorist threat requires more subtlety than simply trying to stamp it out. To deal with people who believe that acts of terrorism are the only way they're to make their grievances heard requires a political response, too." But as a new wave of attacks and crackdowns hardens attitudes on both sides, the strife is unlikely to end even with Ocalan out of the picture.