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Turkish voters will decide on April 16 whether their country’s parliamentary system, where the prime minister is chosen by elected lawmakers, should be replaced by a presidential model with a strong executive. Should the constitutional referendum pass, the role of prime minister will be dissolved, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will have new and unprecedented powers to appoint his own cabinet and name top members of the judiciary. A yes vote will also extend Erdogan’s hold on power by making him eligible for two additional five year terms and give him the authority to dissolve parliament on national security grounds without the approval from any other government body.

The Netherlands and Germany entered the campaign fray since they host a large community of Turkish ex-pats who will be voting on April 16. Given the greater press freedoms in Europe, the “No” campaign has a stronger voice abroad than in Turkey itself. This has increased tensions between Turkey and the governments of Germany and the Netherlands, reminding the public of the growing clash between the autocratic tendencies of Erdogan and the more open societies of Europe vis-à-vis politicians. Erdogan has arrested hundreds of journalists in the past few years for criticizing his political positions, and even demanded in 2016 that Germany prosecute a comedian for satirizing him.

Polling suggests the support for Erdogan’s constitutional reforms are as close as 50-50 and as they have done in the past, Erdogan and his party, the AKP, have waged a campaign based on the need to respond to internal and external terror threats.

Regionally, Turkey continues to oppose the Assad regime, but has also tried to patch up differences with Russia and has also played a role in arming and training fighters that are slowing clawing their way toward the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa.  

The April 6 U.S. bombing of a Syrian airbase used by the Assad regime to launch a chemical weapons attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun, signaling a possible increase in U.S. involvement in the region, was supported by Erdogan. But Turkish support for a larger role in Syria is likely to wane in the long-term since the West’s anti-ISIS strategy heavily relies on Kurdish fighters – an ethnic group that the AKP and Erdogan consider a greater threat to Turkish borders than ISIS – and one whose demands at the end of the war will likely be recognition of a larger Kurdistan than currently exists in northern Iraq.

Should Erdogan prevail on April 16, and consolidate more executive power, the relationship between NATO member Turkey and the West is likely to deteriorate further. Erdogan may be intentionally gambling with Turkey’s western relationships in favor of cultivating a leadership role in Muslim-majority countries. Strong economic gains in the past 10 years gave Erdogan the ability to advance his neo-Ottoman agenda by building economic, charitable and religious ties from Bosnia to Pakistan. Moreover, Erdogan has used his international trips to Muslim-majority countries to push the argument that Muslim countries must unite in opposition to an anti-Islam agenda in the West. As a result, during the time Turkey has been stable and relatively prosperous, Erdogan succeeded in making himself popular among Muslims globally. Whether turning East is economically an effective strategy remains to be seen.

Erdogan’s over-confidence may become Turkey’s Achilles heel.  If the constitutional referendum passes, the West will likely become warier of the Turkish regime in general, hurting Turkey’s economy in the long-run, though probably not hurting Erdogan and his family personally.  Consequently, the economic power of Turkey, which is the engine of Erdogan’s soft power in the East, may lose steam, resulting in the AKP falling out of favor among Turks if the country’s economic growth rate continues to drop from a its high of 9 percent in 2012; to 6.1 percent in 2015; and to 2.9 percent in 2016.

Conversely, if Erdogan’s “Yes” campaign fails, the AKP is likely to also lose the next general election in 2019, having over-played its hand politically, providing Turkey’s secular parties an opportunity to prove  they can again lead, despite Turkey’s complicated internal politics and thorny regional issues like the response to terrorism. 

On March 22, 2017, terrorist assailant Khalid Masood killed five people during a vehicle and stabbing attack in London. The following day, a similar attack was thwarted in Antwerp, Belgium. On April 7, another assailant carried out a suspected terrorist attack, this time in Sweden, hijacking a truck and careening into crowds of pedestrians at the Ahlens Mall in Stockholm, killing at least three people and wounding countless more. Similar ISIS-claimed attacks in Nice, Ohio, and Berlin each involved armed assailants using cars and trucks as weapons, charging at pedestrians in crowded civilian areas.

The recent spate of vehicular attacks is not a new phenomenon. Attacks using vehicles were carried out beginning in 2006 in London, Quebec, Dijon, Nantes, Jerusalem, and North Carolina. ISIS’s explicit calls to employ cars as weapons—and encouragement from other terrorist organizations like Hamas—appear to have served as an inspiration for the recent wave of attacks worldwide.

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas Call for (and Claim) Attacks:

Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas have called for or claimed responsibility for vehicular terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda’s second issue of Inspire magazine, in October 2010, contained an article urging vehicular attacks and referring to a pickup truck as a potential “mowing machine” that can be used to “mow down the enemies of Allah.” Inspire editor-in-chief Yahya Ibrahim urged al-Qaeda followers to “[g]o for the most crowded location” and “pick up as much speed as you can” in order “strike as many people as possible.”

Other groups have similarly encouraged the use of motor vehicles as weapons of terror. In the fall of 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani issued a call to kill non-believers using any means at their disposal. In November of that year, French ISIS fighter Abu Salman al-Faranci appeared in an ISIS video calling for followers to carry out attacks if they cannot travel to ISIS-held territory. As Faranci said: “Terrorize them and do not allow them to sleep due to fear and horror. There are weapons and cars available and targets ready to be hit. Even poison is available…”

On July 14, 2016, Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel used a 19-ton refrigerated truck to carry out the Bastille Day attack in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding hundreds more. In mid-November 2016, ISIS’s third issue of Rumiyah included an article calling for its followers to carry out vehicle attacks. The article specified the ideal type, weight, and speed of a car needed for terror purposes, and encouraged attacks on “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, festivals, parades[, and] political rallies.” Later that month, Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan carried out a car and knife attack at Ohio State University, wounding 11 people.

ISIS and al-Qaeda are not the only terrorist groups to urge vehicular attacks. In November 2014, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups—including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—praised a wave of vehicular attacks in Israel and called for more. One such image posted online read, “Run [them] over, son of Hebron...and son of Jerusalem. Take your car...and run over the Zionists.”

Timeline of Major Vehicular Terrorist Attacks:

Terrorists have carried out attacks using cars and trucks in a wide range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Israel, Germany, and Belgium. CEP has documented 11 major vehicular terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe since 2000. Of these attacks, three took place in France and two in the United States. The single deadliest vehicular terrorist attack in Europe was the July 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, when terrorist assailant Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel killed 84 people and wounded hundreds at Nice’s Promenade Des Anglais.

• March 4, 2006: United States. Iranian-born Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar uses an SUV to ram into pedestrians at the University of North Carolina, wounding eight people. Taheri-azar tells investigators that he carried out the attack in order to punish the U.S. government and “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.”
• May 22, 2013: United Kingdom. Two British-born assailants ram a car into British soldier Lee Rigby before attacking and killing him with knives and a meat cleaver.
• October 20, 2014: Canada. Canadian-born ISIS supporter Martin Couture-Rouleau rams a car into a group of soldiers at a shopping center in Quebec, killing one and wounding another.
• December 21, 2014: France. A man rams his car into crowds in the eastern French city of Dijon while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” injuring 13 people.
• December 22, 2014: France. A man who had recently watched a program on Chechnya rams a van into a crowd of pedestrians in Nantes, western France, wounding at least 10 people.
• July 14, 2016: France. Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel carries out the Bastille Day attacks in France, killing 84 people and wounding hundreds more. ISIS claims responsibility.
• November 28, 2016: United States. Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan carries out the car and knife attack at Ohio State University, wounding 11 people. Prior to the attack, Artan calls al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki “our hero” in a message posted to Facebook. ISIS claims responsibility.
• December 19, 2016: Germany. Tunisian-born Anis Amri carries out the Christmas Market attack in Germany, killing 12 people and wounding 48 others. ISIS claims responsibility.
• March 22, 2017: United Kingdom. British-born Khalid Masood rams a crowd of pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing four people and wounding dozens more. The driver then crashes his car into the gates of the Palace of Westminster. He stabs to death a police officer outside the nearby Houses of Parliament before being shot and killed by police. ISIS claims responsibility.
• March 23, 2017: Belgium. A man is intercepted while driving at high-speed toward crowds at De Meir, the major shopping street in Antwerp.
• April 7, 2017: Sweden. An unidentified assailant drives a truck into a crowd at a shopping mall in Stockholm, killing at least three people and injuring others.

There has also been a wave of vehicular terrorist attacks targeting Israeli soldiers and civilians. These car-ramming attacks include:

• July 2, 2008: Assailant rams a front-end loader into buses and cars in Jerusalem, killing three people and wounding 40 others.
• July 22, 2008: Assailant rams a bulldozer into nearby vehicles in Jerusalem, wounding at least 16 people.
• September 22, 2008: Assailant rams his car into a group of Israelis in Jerusalem, injuring 15 Israeli soldiers and four civilians.
• March 5, 2009: Assailant uses a bulldozer to ram into an Israeli police car, injuring two officers.
• October 22, 2014: Assailant rams his car into a crowd of pedestrians at a light rail train station in Jerusalem, killing two people—including a three-month-old girl—and wounding seven more.
• November 5, 2014: Assailant drives into a crowded area in Jerusalem, killing two people and wounding more than a dozen others. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) both praise the recent wave of vehicular attacks and call for more.
• January 8, 2017: An alleged ISIS supporter plows a truck into a group of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem, killing four people and injuring at least 10 others.
• April 6, 2017: Assailant carries out a vehicular attack in the West Bank, killing one Israeli soldier and wounding another in an attack praised by Hamas.

On February 14, the Iraqi military announced that a wave of airstrikes directed at ISIS on February 11 in Anbar province near the border with Syria had killed 77 extremists, including 13 senior commanders. One of the airstrikes also targeted the terror group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — but officials were unable to verify if he was at the location at the time of the attack and if so, whether he had escaped or had been injured or killed.

This wasn’t the first time there has been tantalizing speculation that the reclusive leader of ISIS has been seriously wounded or killed. For example, a British newspaper reported in June 2016 that Baghdadi had had been killed during a coalition bombing raid in Raqqa, Syria.

Baghdadi news surfaced again on March 1 when the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported about an alleged farewell address Baghdadi allegedly delivered through ISIS affiliated preachers, admitting defeat in Iraq and ordering the remaining militants in Mosul to either run and hide, return to their home countries and carry out attacks, or blow themselves up, promising those who chose the latter “72 women in heaven.”

While Baghdadi’s death or capture would certainly be a huge symbolic achievement for coalition forces, Baghdadi, who has spoken rarely, has never been ISIS’s inspirational leader and the reason why so many thousands have been willing to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq. From the time a few hundred ISIS fighters first swept across the desert and captured Mosul in 2014, the group’s success owed as much to marketing and media savvy as to battlefield victories. ISIS continues to produce  slick propaganda videos, most horrendously violent. The videos, and relentless hate-filled messaging, continues to be broadcast day and night over the Internet and on social media platforms in many languages, and is echoed by thousands of supporters and recruiters. This 21^st Century media machine has always been ISIS’s backbone and why it was able to entice more than 30,000 men and women from 100 countries, including America, to join. 

ISIS may be eventually driven from Mosul, and its Syrian stronghold, Raqqa, but the group is evolving. Recent attacks have been carried out by ISIS affiliates in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, Somalia, India, Bangladesh and other parts of Asia. And beginning in late 2014, ISIS senior leaders like former official spokesperson Abu Mohammad al-Adnani have been hinting that rather than traveling to Syria and Iraq, followers could bring glory to the Caliphate by also carrying out attacks in their home countries.

And they have responded. A series of what were initially thought to be “lone-wolf” attacks were determined to be guided and directed by ISIS recruiters and propagandists like Rachid Kassim, who was targeted in early February by a U.S. airstrike near Mosul. French authorities have connected Kassim to numerous terror incidents, including the murder of a police officer and his wife in Magnanville France on June 13, 2016; the murder of an elderly priest in Normandy on July 26, 2016; and the attempt by three French women to detonate a car filled with explosives outside the Notre Dame cathedral in September 2016.

And Kassim was only one ISIS recruiter. Many more remain, as does ISIS’s ability to produce propaganda videos and other incitement content in many languages and broadcast it over the Internet and social media platforms in search of potential conscripts to radicalization and terror around the world.

While most Internet and social media platforms ostensibly prohibit violence and promotion of terrorism, removing content is a slow and mechanical process that most often is triggered bv a user complaint. And taking down something does not prevent it from being uploaded again.

In June 2016, the Counter Extremism Project unveiled a response to the weaponization of the Internet and social media platforms by ISIS and other extremist groups. In partnership with Dartmouth College Computer Science Professor Dr. Hany Farid, the world’s foremost authority on “hashing” technology, the CEP announced eGLYPH, software capable of detecting and efficiently and permanently removing extremist images, videos and audio messages that have been pre-determined to violate the terms of service of Internet and social media companies.

The same type of software developed by Dr. Farid almost 10 years ago is widely used today around the world to instantly identify and remove graphic images of child exploitation. Remarkably, the Internet and social media companies resisted adopting the child exploitation software when it was unveiled. Likewise, despite its promise to shut down a great amount of the raw material that leads to radicalizing and recruiting new terrorists, no Internet or social media company has yet stepped forward and agreed to adopt the eGLYPH software.

We cannot pretend that the Internet and social media is not a place where terrorists are recruiting, radicalizing and glorifying violence with real consequences. The dead bodies strewn on the streets of Paris, Brussels and in other places say otherwise.

In July 2014, ISIS announced itself to the world when it conquered Mosul, an Iraqi city of 1.8 million people, with only about 1,500 lightly armed men. But through coordinated social media promotion and astute marketing, ISIS was able to frighten a much larger and more heavily armed Iraqi army of 25,000 soldiers into abandoning their weapons and fleeing the city.

The Caliphate was born. But in August 2014, awakened to the horrors of ISIS’s brutal form of governance, the U.S. and other nations began to halt ISIS’s expansion. U.S.-led airstrikes resulted in ISIS’s battlefield losses and a shrinking territorial footprint. 

In response ISIS ramped up calls for its followers to strike in their home countries, rather than traveling to Syria and Iraq. For example, ISIS spokesperson Abu Mohammad al-Adnani urged followers to kill disbelievers “in any manner or way however it may be. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”

Statistics released by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) confirm that these messages were heard loud and clear throughout 2015. According to IEP’s Global Terrorism Index 2016, international terrorism-related deaths in 2015 dropped 10 percent overall, to a total of 29,376 in 2015 compared to 2014, driven primarily by military actions against ISIS and Boko Haram. But while deaths from terrorism fell by almost a third in Iraq and Nigeria, deaths from terror in developed nations skyrocketed. While 77 individuals in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (U.S., E.U., some Asian countries, and Turkey) died in terrorist incidents in 2014, that number climbed to 577 in 2015—the highest yearly number since 2001.  Two countries in particular—Turkey and France—suffered the highest number of terrorism-related fatalities among OECD countries.

The heightened loss of life due to terrorism in the West can be directly attributed to major ISIS inspired and directed incidents. In Turkey, ISIS suicide bombers killed 32 civilians in the southern town of Suruç in July 2015, and more than 100 people in Ankara that October. The trend continued into 2016, as three suspected ISIS suicide bombers killed 45 people at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport in June. The country has also been ravaged by bombings perpetrated by the PKK, or the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a Kurdish separatist terrorist group which the Turkish government has classified as the most dangerous terrorist group in the country. Statistics covering all of 2016 will be released later this year.

In 2015, France experienced its highest terrorism-related death tolls since 2000. The country was hit with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 and the horrific ISIS massacre in Paris in November that claimed the lives of 130 people. There were also numerous, intermittent ISIS-related attacks scattered throughout the year. The carnage continued in 2016 when an ISIS-inspired Tunisian mowed down 85 people with a cargo truck in July following Bastille Day fireworks in the southern city of Nice.

Notable inspired attacks carried out by self-radicalized individuals—often dubbed “lone wolves” or “bedroom radicals”—include the November 2015 San Bernardino, California attack that killed 14 and the June 2016 Orlando, Florida shootings that killed 49. In both cases, it was later revealed that the teachings of deceased al-Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki—whose propaganda material is readily available online—had been a primary radicalizing influence.

Directed attacks in OECD countries were carried out by individuals who directly communicated and received orders from ISIS operatives. Some of these perpetrators previously fought alongside ISIS in Syria, and entered OECD countries by posing as Syrian refugees with ISIS-supplied counterfeit passports. Such attacks include those in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016.

To reduce inspired attacks, OECD countries must reduce the ability of individuals to radicalize remotely, i.e. over the Internet. This means keeping the worst-of-the-worst extremist content off major social media platforms. The technology now exists to enable social media companies in enforcing their standards which already prohibit terror promoting content. CEP recently developed, in partnership with Dartmouth College Computer Science Professor Dr. Hany Farid, software that can find and efficiently remove extremist images, videos and audio messages that have been pre-determined to violate the terms of service of leading Internet and social media companies.

The U.S.-led coalition has made progress in reducing terrorism-related deaths in the Middle East and Africa. The IEP statistics clearly show that Western countries are now bigger targets than ever and additional measures must be taken to shore up borders and to prevent radicalization and incitement to violence. As ISIS shrinks in Iraq and Syria, its impact must not increase in the West.