“Would you like to spend your vacation in a seaside town with such an image? Would you sail into a sea whose bottom is littered with the bodies of dead children?” Tezkan wrote.
The second mistake was Ankara’s failure to acknowledge the threat posed by the rising wave of jihadism.
“As a result, terrorists had no problem entering the country and Islamic State (Daesh) is now operating in Turkey often targeting foreign nationals visiting this country,” Mehmet Tezkan noted.
Thirdly, Turkey's tourism industry has descended into one of its worst crises in history after the number of Russian tourists visiting the country dwindled following last year’s shooting down of a Russian bomber in Syria, forcing many seaside hotel owners to sell their property.
“We broke off relations, we lost the Russians who kept our tourism industry afloat,” Tazkan emphasized.
And, last, but not least, Ankara did nothing to prevent war with the Kurdistan Workers Party and seek a peaceful solution to the Kurdish problem.
“As a result of this, Turkish cities have descended into chaos, unseen since WW2. Small wonder that foreign tourists have stopped coming,” Mehmet Tazkan wrote in conclusion.
