The Islamic State is taking its fight to Turkey

Editor's note: This is Chatter, our morning rundown of what you need and want to know around the world. Fortunately for us all, you can have Chatter emailed to you every day. Just sign up here!

NEED TO KNOW:

The Islamic State is apparently taking its fight to Turkey. In what appeared to be a retaliatory attack, a suicide bomber on Monday targeted a cultural center where a large group of young people had gathered for a conference. The attendees had planned to visit the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani to help with reconstruction.

Kobani is one of the few success stories in the fight against the Islamic State. Kurdish fighters in Syria drove the terrorist group out of the town last year. So there's a “high probability,” according to the Turkish prime minister, that the Islamic State was behind the attack. More than 30 people died. It was the deadliest attack since twin bombings killed at least 50 people in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli in 2013.

Turkey's role in the Syrian conflict is a controversial one. It has largely sat out the fight against the Islamic State while Kurdish fighters take the lead. And many Turkish Kurds actually believe that Turkey's government — which has long fought against calls for autonomy among Turkey's own Kurdish population — is directly supporting the Islamic State by letting weapons and fighters cross its border with Syria.

The Turkish prime minister denied this in a speech after the attack. He said the government had identified suspects and that the bombing was an attack on all of Turkey. And, like in other countries that have been targeted by terrorist bombers, he said a cabinet meeting was called for Wedneday to look at new security measures around its border to protect Turkey from further attacks.

WANT TO KNOW:

This is interesting: The long-established trend of workers from poor Latin American countries packing up and heading to Western Europe's advanced economies, seeking jobs and a new life, has reversed. Now, the opposite journey is more common.

Young people from Spain, for instance, are more often migrating the other way, leaving their struggling European Union country in the hopes of landing work somewhere in Latin America. One couple, interviewed by GlobalPost Senior Correspondent Simeon Tegel, moved to Peru from Spain to open a bookstore.

According to a report released in May by the International Organization for Migration, for the first time in nearly two decades, the number of Europeans heading west as of 2010 outnumbered Latin Americans heading to the "old world."

This probably says more about the state of Europe than the state of Latin America. Most of the westward migrants are coming from Spain, a country that is suffering nearly as much economic hardship as Greece. “Unemployment in Spain has hovered around a mind-boggling 25 percent in recent years. But that may be the least of it. Youth unemployment has been double that, at around 50 percent,” Tegel writes.

So by 2012, Spaniards made up some 85 percent of all European immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean. Conquistadors, no more.

STRANGE BUT TRUE:

British Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't think we should blame the Iraq War for the existence of the Islamic State. He said so in a really long speech yesterday all about the Islamic State and terror threats to the UK.

“Some argue it’s because of historic injustices and recent wars, or because of poverty and hardship,” Cameron said, according to a transcript of the speech released by the UK government. “This argument, what I call the grievance justification, must be challenged. So when people say 'it’s because of the involvement in the Iraq War that people are attacking the West,' we should remind them: 9/11 — the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack — happened before the Iraq War.”

Instead, Cameron says the focus should rest on the group's own ideology, not foreign occupation in Iraq. (The subtext would seem to be, "It's not our fault.”) But in reality, there's a whole lot of evidence that the Iraq War played a central role in the development of the Islamic State. As GlobalPost's Timothy McGrath writes: “Maybe a similar-looking army of Salafist takfiris would have managed to conquer parts of the Middle East and declare a caliphate, but it's nearly impossible to imagine how today's conditions in Iraq and Syria could have happened without the Iraq War.”

You can read more about this from McGrath here. And here is a detailed timeline of how the Iraq War gave the Islamic State fertile ground to grow. There are also good books on the subject. Michael Weiss's and Hassan Hassan's "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror" or Jessica Stern's and J.M. Berger's "ISIS: The State of Terror" are two must-reads.