Last Saturday bomb blasts in the Turkish capital Ankara left 128 dead and some 246 people wounded. The attacks targeted a peace rally organised by the pro-Kurdish HDP, and Ankara's main train station.
The bombings occurred in the wake of the ruling AK Party's recent electoral defeat and its decision to call a fresh election, due on 1 November. Since losing the last election, President Erdogan has effectively dumped a peace deal with the Kurdish nationalist PKK and restarted Ankara's war against the Kurdish people. Entire towns have been subjected to bloody sieges, and Kurdish camps in northern Iraq have been again bombed from the air.
The PKK and its ally the HDP have reiterated the Kurds' desire to return to the peace process, but Erdogan has ignored this. For the first time since the 1980s, Turkey is headed towards a full-blooded civil war, just when a viable peace solution to the Kurdish conflict was about to come to fruition.
Senseless and immoral behaviour, certainly, but grist for the mill of Erdogan's strategy of tension. Faced with losing power, he clutches at the straw of 'national security' to retain power.
This is not simply megalomania (although that is part of the equation), but also because Erdogan knows he faces prosecution if he relinquishes power, due to his increasingly blatant flouting of the constitution. He is also widely believed to have sent vast amounts of corruptly obtained money out of the country.
After serving the maximum time permitted under Turkish law as prime minister, he simply transferred to the presidency. In Turkey the president has supposedly limited powers, with the prime minister being the dominant force. Erdogan has subordinated Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (also from the AK Party) to his will, since August 2014. The boss of the intelligence organisation MIT, Hakan Fidan, is required under the constitution to report directly to the PM, but instead reports first and foremost to Erdogan.
Erdogan would love to postpone the election indefinitely, but the only pretext available to him under the constitution is if Turkey is at war with a foreign land. The only war Turkey could provoke with another country is with Syria, which would have the additional benefit of allowing Ankara to engage directly with the PKK's Syrian affiliate, the Partiya Yekîtî a Demokratik.
But Russia's direct involvement in Syria's civil war means that NATO member Turkey would be placing the West in direct military conflict with Moscow — arguably a