May 4, 2017

Be they soldiers or police, the new spirit embraced by Turkey’s security forces is unabashedly Islamic. Video footage of Turkish soldiers in Syria and police cadets in Istanbul chanting Islamist slogans is increasingly commonplace.

Therefore, news that police officers were under the influence of alcohol when they accidentally drove their armored vehicle into a family's home in the mainly Kurdish southeastern town of Silopi on May 3, killing two children, has had something of a man-bites-dog effect.

Seven-year-old Muhammet Yildirim and his six-year-old brother Furkan were asleep when the vehicle struck their house in the Karsiyaka neighborhood at 11:30 p.m., bringing the wall of their bedroom crashing down on them. The boys were rushed to a local hospital but did not survive. The police manning the vehicle reportedly fled the scene. Nedim Oruc, a Silopi-based reporter for the Dihaber news agency, told Al-Monitor that eyewitnesses who saw their flight claimed that they were intoxicated. The men were said to have been parked earlier outside the local headquarters of the far-right Nationalist Action Party, which they were protecting.

Angry residents clashed with police who came to investigate. Sirnak Governor Ali Ihsan Su reportedly told the grieving family the tragedy was “fate.” And in a statement the governor's office denied reports that the policemen were drunk, saying the driver of the vehicle had been subjected to alcohol and blood tests and that he came out clean. The incident was being investigated "administratively" and "legally", it noted.

Nusirevan Elci, the president of the Sirnak bar association, told Al-Monitor that it wasn’t clear if the perpetrators had been arrested. “Impunity is not limited to political cases; it’s across the board and justice is rarely delivered if at all,” he said.