Death of an ambassador

ISTANBUL — Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, had come to the art exhibit in Ankara to present beautiful photos of the Russian countryside. When he stepped up to the podium to speak, some guests noticed that a tall, thin man in a black suit was standing behind him. He looked like security personnel, and he was. He was a 22-year-old policeman named Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, working in the Turkish capital. But his intention was not to protect.

Just after the ambassador said his welcoming words, Altıntaş took out his gun, fired into the air and then into the ambassador’s back. In a graphic online video of the attack, he can be heard to shout, “Allahu Akbar,” and others words in Arabic about waging jihad. Then, in his native language, Turkish, he says: “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria!” He also declares: “You will not taste safety, unless our lands are safe.”

The obvious conclusion is that the assassin was a Turkish Islamist angry at Russia because of what is happening in Syria. Russia, after all, has been the biggest patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which is responsible for the mass killing of civilians, especially in the predominantly Sunni areas that have supported the opposition forces.

This deadly partnership was in evidence most recently in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where the conquest of the city by the regime last week was followed by huge human suffering. The tragedy in Aleppo resonated in Turkey, especially among the Islamists who feel solidarity with the Syrian opposition. The assassin could have been avenging the deaths in Aleppo, as he stated, either as an affiliate of a Syria-based jihadist group such as the Al-Nusra Front, or as a “lone wolf” acting on his own resentment.

And yet, from the first moments after the attack, the Turkish government made it clear that it had a different interpretation of the assassination, condemning it as a political conspiracy to disrupt the rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow. “The Karlov assassination,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Twitter, “is a clear provocation against Turkish-Russian relations.”

Putin and Erdoğan have deployed the conspiracy theory from the start.

Pro-government media quickly followed suit, painting a picture of a conspiracy in which the assassin was a covert member of “FETO” — the “Fethullah Terrorist Organization,” which is how the Turkish government refers to the movement led by the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gülen.

The evidence presented was circumstantial, based primarily on the fact that the assassin attended a Gülen-linked prep school and that he took two days of annual leave on July 15 and 16, the days of a failed coup the government accuses Gülen of orchestrating. And yet, it seems more than enough to convince the Turkish government and its supporters.

We may never know the real motive behind the assassination. The gunman was “neutralized” by the police — shot and killed on site. What’s clear is that Ankara will go out of its way to avoid tension with Russia. The government has already declared that it will name a street after the deceased ambassador, and it has agreed to include a team of Russian experts in its investigation of the crime.

And it seems that Russia is willing to play along. Soon after the attack, Erdoğan called his counterpart Vladimir Putin on the phone, and it seems the two men came to an agreement. Putin declared that the attack was “without doubt a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalization of Russian-Turkish relations, and spoiling the Syrian peace process which is being actively pushed by Russia, Turkey, Iran and others.”

It should be remembered that Russian-Turkish relations hit a nadir in November 2015, when a Russian warplane was downed by Turkish jets on the Syrian border. The incident was followed by months of cold war between the two countries, overcome in June when Turkey apologized to Russia and explained away the jet’s downing as part of a Gülenist conspiracy on behalf of the West.

This time, Putin and Erdoğan have deployed the conspiracy theory from the start. This is likely to help avert tension between two countries whose political systems and worldviews are growing increasingly similar, despite their disagreement in Syria.

Therefore, those who were quick to read the Russian ambassador’s murder as a repeat of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 were wrong. That famous attack sparked World War I. Karlov’s death is more likely to have the opposite effect: pulling two erstwhile antagonists closer together and uniting them against heinous conspiracies, real or perceived.

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist, author and weekly columnist for Al-Monitor.com.