TURKEY is cracking down on its border with Syria after a suicide bomber murdered 30 young people on Monday in the frontier town of Suruc. The announcement made by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is long overdue. For months Turkey had been warned by its friends that its ambivalent attitude to the terrorists of Daesh (so-called IS) represented a danger, not simply to the region but to Turkey itself. Now it has learned the error of ignoring that advice. At the very least, the rally in Suruc ought to have alerted the authorities to the possibility of a terror attack. Hundreds of young people had gathered to back a project to rebuild the shattered town of Kobane on the Syrian side of the border. Though many of them were Kurds —and Kobane was predominantly a Kurdish town — there were also ethnic Turks from around the country who were supporting the cause. What the Turkish government has clearly failed to recognize was that the savage destruction in Kobane had come to symbolize the great evil that is Daesh. The terrorists made a renewed thrust toward the now-liberated town last month, coinciding with the Kuwait mosque bombing, the Sousse beach massacre in Tunisia, the French beheading and the murder of African Union troops in Somalia. Before they were beaten off, they rounded up more than 230 Kurds, men, women and children and executed them in their village a few kilometers from the town. To rebuild Kobane from the rubble that it has become, will represent the finest answer to the nihilistic fanaticism of the Daesh death cult. Daesh can bring rack and ruin but it cannot destroy the indomitable human spirit, it cannot eradicate human decency — it will in short never prevail against a decent world that rejects absolutely its evil ambitions. Thus Suruc on Monday joined Kobane as a rallying point for all who feel disgust and abhorrence for Daesh and all its wicked works. The Turkish government therefore needs to do far more than implement a long-overdue tightening of security along its border with Syria to stop the flow of recruits as well as supplies to Daesh. It needs to clampdown on the networks within Turkey that have been organizing this support for the terrorists. It needs to root out those who for money or out of perverse conviction are prepared to sustain Daesh. Perhaps one of the most telling gestures that Ankara could make would be to give overt support to the Kobane rebuilding project. This could serve two important purposes. First it would demonstrate to the terrorists that Turkey was on the side of those who would build and create a decent society rather than those who wish to destroy and obliterate all that is civilized. But just as importantly, it will show to Turkey's restless Kurds that the policies of rapprochement, initiated by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he first became prime minister a decade ago, are still a live agenda. For weeks, the Turkish army stoped Kurdish fighters crossing the border to support their beleaguered comrades in the town. Pictures went around the world, showing many Turkish tanks ranged on the hills, doing precisely nothing while the terrorists mounted assault after assault on Kobane. In the end Ankara relented and allowed the defenders to be supported from Turkey. Now is the time for Turkey to step forward and give real support to Kobane, to help rebuild the town and then to defend it.
