This plan should have been made earlier

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu received a briefing from security officials following the last terrorist attack in Ankara and decided on a new “Capital City Security Action Plan” for Ankara. According to this plan, police and new technological equipment support will be provided to the capital city. Entries and exits to the capital will be monitored more strictly with police and gendarmeries. 

Additionally, measures will be taken for possible attacks at critical buildings, while a “visible police presence” will be applied and 2,000 new police officers will be on duty after special training. 

Actually, the history of civilizations has been written like this, in a sense; people drew lessons from disasters, developed measures against them and practiced these measures to prevent the same calamities from happening again. 

For this reason, it is correct that new security measures were considered and practiced after the Ankara attack. However, I cannot stop myself from asking: Was this the first attack in Ankara? 

In October last year, again in Ankara, terrorists conducted a similar suicide attack, causing the death of 102 citizens. How come, at that time, it was not considered that such attacks would repeat and such a comprehensive security plan was not run? 

If such a plan was applied, then could the last attack have been prevented? 

Was he an asylum-seeker or not? 

Is the name of the terrorist who organized the attack in Ankara Abdülbaki Sömer, as the terror organization revealed, or is it Syrian Salih Neccar, as officials stated? 

Sönmez’s father claimed the photo of the person stated as the person who carried out the attack belonged to his son. DNA research was conducted and it was disclosed the terrorist executing the attack was Sömer.

Thus, it means that Sömer, even though he was a Turkish citizen, was able to apply as if he was a Syrian asylum-seeker and was able to obtain an asylum-seeker identity.

This demonstrates that the asylum-seeker records held at border posts are not to be considered that reliable.
 
Is there a new plan to assure the reliability of these records made at the country’s borders? Is there any ongoing study about this? 

Another aspect that drew my attention was that according to official statements, this person, after he got his asylum-seeker identity, had gone back and forth to Syria a couple of times.

I could not understand what kind of business this was.

How could a person who declared he could not stay in Syria and became an asylum-seeker be allowed to go back to Syria and come back again? 

If he was able to visit his country and come back so easily, then why was his asylum accepted? Isn’t this an indication of how porous our borders are? 

If he was able to enter and exit Syria that easily, wasn’t this a sign that he had certain organizational relations? Why was this aspect not taken into consideration? 

It is apparent that our lack of policy about asylum-seekers concerns not only the disorderliness of the refugees in our country.

You can go to the link below and read more on what kind of dangerous consequences this situation may cause in an interview on www.neotempo.com with Selçuk Şirin from New York University. 

http://www.neotempo.com/yasam/ekmegimizi-suriyelilerle-paylasmazsak-bedelini-oderiz