Daily Times

ISTANBUL – In Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s home district of Kasimpasa in Istanbul, residents strongly back the on slaught against Kurdish militants ordered by its most famous son but also show flickers of concern over the long term consequences of the action.

Erdogan is father-like figure to residents, with his picture hanging from shop windows and tea houses and even the local stadium named after him.The working class district on the steep hills above the Golden Horn is a bastion of support for Erdogan and it’s hard to find anyone who says a bad word about him.

“He does his very best for us. If God wills, it, he will not let the murderers go on,” said Emine, 45, a mother.”It is not because of Tayyip that things have turned out this way,” said Ahmet Kucukoglu, 29, who thinks that Turkey is again victim of a plot hatched by foreign powers.

The son of a coastguard officer, Erdogan was born in Kasimpasa, which has a tradition in shipbuilding going back to the Ottoman Empire. Erdogan then spent his earliest years in family’s ancestral region of Rize by the Black Sea but had returned to Istanbul by his early teens.

Pensioner Nurrettin Onder said he thought that Erdogan has done what needed to be done by ordering the air raids against PKK bases in northern Iraq.