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On August 12, an 18-year-old man identified as Arda Küçükyetim, wearing a helmet and bulletproof vest with a Nazi “sonnenrad” on it, stabbed five people, leaving two in critical condition, in the garden of the Tepebaşı Mosque in Eskişehir, Turkey, before being detained by police. The attacker broadcast his assault on Twitter using a webcam attached to his vest. The video has spread rapidly across online platforms. The assailant also published a manifesto outlining his ideology and attempts at recruiting others to commit terrible acts of violence. Below is a brief explainer of the manifesto’s contents, based on a translation from Turkish to English.
Radicalized by the Far Right
The attacker’s manifesto leaves no room for doubt that he was motivated by hate and a violent, extremist belief system, and that he was influenced by the transnational spread of far-right extremist beliefs and violence.
There are clear influences of neo-Nazism in the manifesto. The author regularly uses demeaning slurs to refer to ethnic minorities, has a special hatred for Jewish people, and harbors a number of prominent antisemitic conspiracy theory beliefs. The symbols included in the manifesto include the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division’s logo, several Nazi Totenkopfs, people wearing skull masks, an image of a Groyper (a common meme among followers of American Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes), bigoted cartoons by Ben Garrison, and sig runes. There are also half a dozen images of previous mass killers from around the world.
The attacker drew inspiration from these “saints,” a reference to the infamous radicalized mass shooters who are idolized on Terrorgram channels. These included Norwegian bomber and mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque attacks Brenton Tarrant, Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock, and American bomber Timothy McVeigh. Elsewhere in the manifesto, he also mentions the Halle, Germany, synagogue shooter Stephan Balliet and the Russian Liski bomber Viktor Mirskoy. Aside from Paddock, whose motives for committing the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting are still unclear, though there is some evidence he may have harbored anti-government beliefs, each of these individuals were motivated by white supremacy or other forms of bigotry. According to his manifesto, the Turkish attacker claimed that his assault would place him among the “list of saints.”
Beyond general neo-Nazi beliefs that are typical in the West, the author also exhibits extremist beliefs that are adapted to the Turkish context. For one, he dedicates a specific section of his manifesto to the Kurds, referring to their desired future state as an “imaginary country called Bokistan.” He claims Kurds are controlled by Jews and the United States and “tarnish the reputation of [the Turkish] race.” He praises the founder of the Turkish state Kemal Atatürk and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for having “eliminated” them. Based on his anti-Kurdish beliefs, the attacker points out his desire to attack the “TKP Building” (the Turkish Communist Party) several places in the manifesto, as well as the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP), and Yeşil Sol Parti (Green Left Party, YSP) party buildings. Aside from all being left-leaning parties, each has in common a sympathy for the plight of the Kurds. The mention of the “saint” Viktor Mirskoy is of relevance because of his intention to go on to murder Kurds in the Voronezh area during his killing spree. As with the Allen, Texas, shooter (see GPAHE’s reporting on this attack here), who was Latino, this attack also points to a further spread of white supremacist beliefs outside of the typical “white” demographic of people of European ancestry.
The author portrays himself as a “lone wolf” attacker, and while there is no implicit indication that he was involved with organized extremist groups or parties, radicalization of this kind can never truly be said to be an isolated incident. According to his own accounting, the attacker was radicalized online at a young age, and clearly immersed in an online culture that engaged in hateful discourse, revered terrorism and those that committed these acts, and desired to “troll” and engage in other behavior that taunted the victims of their attacks. The perpetrator’s reference to “saints,” symbolic references to the Atomwaffen Division, and his accelerationist worldview, which seeks the collapse of the current political system in order to begin a race war, point to possible links, at least ideologically, to terrorist groups from dark corners of the internet.
Influence of Gaming Culture
The assailant’s manifesto made several references to gaming, along with gamifying (i.e., assigning gaming-like elements to) potential future terrorist actions by categorizing locations, weaponry, and clothing with gaming terms.
The attacker describes people as being “normal NPC(s).” NPC is short for “non-playable character,” a gaming term used to describe characters the player interacts with who serve a singular purpose and have a finite amount of voice lines. The term, which first became a meme (i.e., online joke) on 4chan, is used by the far right to dehumanize people who identify as more progressive, or who aren’t aligned with online far-right culture.
When encouraging terrorist violence, the attacker categorized different locations for attacks as “easy level(s),” “intermediate,” or “nightmare mode,” the latter of which he described as the “most challenging level.” Video games are often split into different levels, each having their own locations in which the player must complete an objective. In this case, the “objective” would be to murder people. Games may also give players the option to choose the difficulty level, typically ranging from easy to hard. Locations described as “easy,” and filled with “infinite spawning bugs,” spawning being a gaming term for appearing or “loading-in,” included churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, “any liberal’s home,” and parks. As the “difficulty” rises, he explains that there will be “faster police response(s)” and a higher “chance of bugs trying to stop you.” More difficult locations to attack included shopping malls, hospitals, and theaters, while the hardest included airports, stadiums, and military bases.
An entire section of the manifesto is dedicated to a point system so that future attackers can gamify their acts of terrorism. The point system is geared towards rewarding the highest number of casualties and dying during the attack. For example, for each person killed, an attacker would get 300 “points,” while for each person injured, they’d get 150 “points.” A point scale was created for the use of certain melee (i.e., handheld) weaponry, firearms, and explosives, with explosives granting the highest number of points due to their potential for causing mass casualties.
Point scales were also created for clothing, which encouraged wearing military vests, boots, gas masks, “WW2 German Helmet,” and for being arrested, publishing a manifesto, committing suicide, being shot by police, and livestreaming the attack. The use of video games and gamification in terrorist violence is unfortunately something we’ve seen before, as games were used for “training purposes” by Breivk, who murdered 77 people in 2011. Video games were also mentioned in the manifesto of the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter, who was responsible for the murder of 51 people while targeting mosques.
This horrific act of violence demonstrates, tragically once again, the far right’s infestation of hatred into gaming and online culture, where a grotesque combination of neo-Nazi beliefs and the glorification of violence thrives and can lead to real world harm. Hateful ideologies are able to spread transnationally in online spaces, leading to the potential for radicalized individuals to engage in targeted attacks anywhere in the world.
