It was a deft strike at the heart of Turkey’s culture and the heart of its multi-billion dollar tourist industry.
The suicide bombing on Sultanahmet Square killed 10 foreign nationals, at least eight of them were German citizens. It was the deadliest attack on Germans abroad in more than 13 years.
As the people of Istanbul began to regroup on Wednesday, Turkey’s prime minister promised the nation’s resolve to fight terror remains unchanged.
“We will continue our fight against terrorism with the same resolve, and will never take a step back,’ Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, according to Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu news agency.
“We will never compromise, not one single inch.”
As if to underscore the point, Turkey detained 68 terror suspects in sweeps across seven provinces, Anadolu reported Wednesday.
Also, Russia’s state-run Sputnik news reported the detentions of three Russian nationals by Turkey on suspicion of being affiliated with ISIS. The report didn’t directly link them to Tuesday’s attack.
Few details on the bomber
Officials quickly blamed ISIS for the attack that simultaneously killed 10 foreign visitors and sent shock waves through the nation’s $34 billion tourism industry.
Few details were released about the bomber. He was in his 20s, born in 1988. He came to Turkey from Syria, registering as a refugee. He wasn’t being tracked by Turkish security.
What authorities want to know is how this person was able to go relatively quickly from Syria to blowing himself up in Istanbul.
Targeting Turkey and the world
Street vendors and shopkeepers opened for business on Wednesday, but had few customers.
A makeshift memorial formed at the site of the attack. People laid red roses in the shadow of the city’s world-famous Blue Mosque.
The suicide bomber detonated in the midst of a German tour group, made up mostly of retirees, German officials said.
At least eight Germans died in the blast, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. She warned the figure could go higher. A Turkish official told CNN that at least nine Germans were killed. Up to two victims haven’t been identified. Another 15 people were wounded, nine of them Germans.
“We have a free society … but there are people who want us harmed,” Merkel said. “We will persevere.”
Still, the attack shocked the nation.
The headline on the German tabloid “Bild” asks: “Was this a targeted attack on us?”
The least time Germany had seen such a deadly attack on its citizens was 2002. A suicide attack on a historic synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killed 14 German tourists, three Tunisians and two French citizens.
Turkey is a popular tourist destination for German citizens. Some 4 million Germans visited Turkey in 2015, more than any other nationality, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Turkey is second only to Spain as a stop for German vacationers.
No group claimed responsibility for the blast, yet Davutoglu pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while still lashing out elsewhere.
“They haven’t just targeted those who died,” Davutoglu said. “They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world.”
Upping the ante
The significance of the attack was financial as well as culture, and took place in an area heavily guarded by Turkish security forces.
Sajjan Gohel, international security director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, doesn’t think it’s a coincidence this suicide blast happened in a square that’s both a draw for tourists and significant to Turkey’s history and its diverse cultural identity — the type of place, he said, “that ISIS is so deeply opposed to.”
“The type of monuments that are in Sultanahmet Square are the type that ISIS has been blowing up in Syria,” Gohel told CNN. “It’s seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It’s a real melting pot.”
Tuesday’s blast — if it’s confirmed to be the terror group’s work — ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more, according to the Asia-Pacific Foundation’s Gohel.
“An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,” Gohel told CNN. “Turkey has to realize that the pipeline that feeds ISIS from Turkey to Syria has to now be cut off, because incidents like this are not one-offs. This could be part of a series of plots.”
Spilling over
To find the likely source of the violence, one only has to look south to Syria, where a civil war has raged for nearly five years.
The conflict has claimed more than 250,000 lives, according to the United Nations. More than half the country’s 17 million residents have fled and a humanitarian crisis remains for those left behind.
This violence can be pinned on many groups, including forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Yet ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there and elsewhere in the region, a fact that’s made the terror group a top target for civilized countries.
A member of NATO, Turkey has increasingly been engaged in this fight — including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey and clamping down to curb more fighters from going through its territory to join the group. ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target, and a recent issue of its Dabiq magazine had a cover showing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alongside U.S. President Barack Obama.
Security check
The blast comes as Turkey deals with multiple security threats — from longstanding nemesis the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, as well as ISIS, which has taken over swaths of Syria and Iraq on its quest to form a far-reaching caliphate.
Ankara has persistently battled the PKK, which the United States and other governments have branded a terror group.
Turkey’s actions against ISIS, which first emerged out of Iraq but now has its de facto capital in Syria, are more recent but have nonetheless made it a target of that terrorist group.
Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS, said Fadi Hakura, associate fellow at Chatham House.
Investigators honed in on ISIS after two suicide blasts in October hit a lunchtime peace rally in Ankara, in which demonstrators were calling for an end to the renewed conflict between the PKK and Turkish government. Those explosions killed as many as 100 people and injured more than 240 more.
