Istanbul explosion: Turkish Government criticised for failing to crack down on Islamic State militants As Turkey comes to grips with the deadly suicide blast that killed 10 people in Istanbul, many in the West have accused the Turkish Government of failing to crack down on Islamic State militants.

Istanbul explosion: Turkish Government criticised for failing to crack down on Islamic State militants

As Turkey comes to grips with the deadly suicide blast that killed 10 people in Istanbul, many in the West have accused the Turkish Government of failing to crack down on Islamic State militants.

Turkish authorities have detained three Russian nationals suspected of links with Islamic State (IS), following the Tuesday's attack.

More than 60 people suspected of links to IS were picked up across the country with reports that one person was arrested in direct connection to the blast.

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It has also emerged that the Syrian man suspected of carrying out the suicide mission had registered with a Turkish immigration office last week and was not on any list of known militant suspects.

The West has accused the Turkish Government of ignoring the threat from IS for too long, instead fixating efforts on fighting Kurdish separatists and allowing the group to fester on Turkey's southern border.
However Turkey's Interior Minister Efkan Ala was on the defensive, saying 3,318 people had been detained over links to IS and other radical groups since the beginning of the Syrian conflict.

But some people, including University of Istanbul political science professor Sabri Sayara, think Turkey's attempts now to crack down on IS are too little too late.Professor Sayara said the Turkish Government's desire to see the Bashar al-Assad regime fall had enabled IS to flourish.

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"They really misjudged the Syrian crisis at the beginning," he said. "Part of that cost, of course, was permitting lots of fighters from various parts of the world and including Turkey to pass through its borders and get into [IS] and other fundamentalist religious organisations fighting
in Syria and Iraq.

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"Now Turkey seems to be reversing its policy but it's a bit too late."

Rift with Kurds 'distracting from fight against Islamic State 'The situation is now complicated after a ceasefire with the Kurds was torn up last August and Turkish forces launched a new crackdown on Kurdish PKK fighters in the country's east.

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More than 500 people have been killed since December, including 32 last weekend.

Professor Sayari said this had distracted from the fight against IS. "Of course if the focus was almost exclusively on the PKK, which it seemed to be, that was not the right way to do it," he said.

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"Fighting two wars at the same time is a problem but the fight against the PKK seems to be going on. The Government seems determined to carry out this. "At the same time they have to find some means of protecting the safety of Turkish citizens against further IS attacks."

Authorities have confirmed that all 10 victims were tourists, and many Turks have expressed devastation at seeing their guests targeted."People visiting our country shouldn't have been killed like that. It's really affected me and all of us a lot," a local told the ABC outside the famous Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet Square.Another man, Samit, feared IS's presence in Turkey.

"May God make them straight. I hope it won't happen again," he said.

Melbourne resident Brian James, on his first visit to Turkey, was lucky to have avoided the deadly explosion.
"We have been coming to this area each morning at around the same time this bomb went off and we would have been here at exactly that time yesterday but I slept in," he said.

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