While money, weapons, people and all sorts of contraband freely flow across the border from Suruc, Turkey, to Syria, toys could not make it across. More than 30 young people who had launched a campaign to take humanitarian relief supplies to Kobani lost their lives July 20 in an apparent suicide attack just as they were briefing the media on their project. About 100 of the activist leftist young people also were wounded.

The Islamic State (IS) has not yet officially claimed responsibility, but reports from the field suggest it was an IS suicide attack.

It appears IS did not wait to be classified as a terror organization in the Turkish legal system before adding to its list of bloody attacks against Turkey.

Turkey had already encountered IS operations in a March 2014 clash at Nigde in which three security officials were killed; the June 2014 seizure of the Turkish Consulate at Mosul; the siege of the Tomb of Suleiman Shah in October; the January suicide attack against a police post in Istanbul; and the June bombing of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) election rally at Diyarbakir.