Turkey attack is latest in IS strategy to drive tourists away from Muslim countries

A few years after the Arab Spring, when the first clear signs that the revolution that had promised so much in terms of political accountability and civic freedoms in the Middle East was beginning to unravel; the wife of a good friend asked me for some advice.

His company wanted him to travel to Erbil, the effective capital of the Kurdish Autonomous region in northern Iraq which had not only been safe and secure but was also a magnet for hundreds of western businessmen.

She was slightly worried and just thought that being a foreign correspondent who'd travelled extensively in the region, I might have some insights that you couldn't get from the travel section of her husband's major commercial law firm.

I said that despite a few demonstrations against the Assad regime in Damascus, and the regime of President Mubarak in Egypt, it would be fine for her husband to go.

Fast forward a number of years dominated by the rise of IS and their specific tactic of targetting western travellers and holiday makers not just in the Middle East but in Europe as well - and the pendulum has swung the other way.

Hearing a friend talking over Christmas of how he wanted to treat his young family to a week in Dubai, and instinctively and without thinking about it, I was cautioning him to avoid any resort or hotel that was especially popular with western tourists and asking him if he couldn't think of holidaying somewhere other than the Middle East.

That's the effect Islamic State's campaign on western tourists has had on someone with over 20 years experience of the region and who is a big fan of the wonderful sights and hospitality the region has to offer.

The attacks on Turkey are not so much a watershed but a deepening of IS' strategy.

From the massacres on the crowded beaches of Tunisia to the gun attack at the wonderful galleries in places like the Bardo Museum in Tunis, to the bombing of airplanes carrying tourists back from the Sinai Peninsular to the streets and bars and cafes of the French capital, Paris, IS has shown its willingness and ability to target and kill Western tourists in places where they congregate.

The attack on Istanbul's tourist focal point of Sultanahmet Square is particularly symbolic.

The Square lies in between two of the most iconic Christian and Western monuments in Europe.

The Sultanahmet Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque) faces the majestic Hagia Sophia basillica, the seat of Eastern Christendom until it was turned into a mosque by Constantinople's (as Istanbul was then known) Ottoman conquerors in 1453.

The aim of IS' strategy is pretty obvious, if crude. Drive tourists away, thus plunging Muslim countries and cities into economic decline and stagnation, whose social effects then drives people to desperation as people feel the West and Westerners have abandoned them, and thus people will flock towards their ideology - whilst all at the same time terrorizing and driving "western infidels away from Muslim lands".

I will never forget meeting a Dutch tourist wounded in the Bardo Museum attack in March last year, as he was being wheeled out of hospital.

"I want to thank the people of Tunisia," he told me "who have also suffered from this attack. The best way of showing my defiance to those who did this, and helping them, is for us Westerners to come back on holiday to Tunisia".

They did. The result was further massacres on the beaches of Sousse.