At least one gunman shot his way into an Istanbul nightclub packed with hundreds of New Year’s revelers on Sunday, killing 35 people and wounding more than 40 in what the provincial governor described as a terrorist attack.
One assailant shot a police officer and a civilian as he entered the Reina nightclub before opening fire at random inside, Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said at the scene. Some reports suggested there were multiple attackers.
“A terrorist with a long-range weapon … brutally and savagely carried out this attack by firing bullets on innocent people who were there solely to celebrate the New Year and have fun,” Sahin told reporters.
The attack again shook Turkey as it tries to recover from a failed July coup and a series of deadly bombings in cities including Istanbul and the capital Ankara, some blamed on Islamic State and others claimed by Kurdish militants.
Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was fatally shot Monday at an art exhibition by a gunman shouting “God is great!” who continued ranting as the diplomat lay dying on the floor and onlookers ducked for cover.
Andrey Karlov was delivering a speech at a museum in the capital city of Ankara when a man dressed in a suit and tie suddenly appeared and opened fire.
“God is great,” he yelled in Arabic. “Those who pledge allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!”
The gunman, who fired eight shots, also smashed several of the photos at the exhibition, according to an AP photographer who was in the audience.
Switching to Turkish, the gunman then yelled, “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria! Step back! Step back! Only death can take me from here!”
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An unnamed gunman gestures after shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey, on Dec. 19, 2016. Burhan Ozbilici / AP
A court has sentenced two Syrian smugglers to four years and two months each in prison over the death of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi and four other people, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported Friday.
The court, in the Aegean resort of Bodrum, convicted the two of human trafficking but acquitted them of the charge of causing the deaths through deliberate negligence, the agency said.
The image of the boy’s body lying face down on a Turkish beach focused world attention on the refugee crisis, graphically illustrating the magnitude of the migrants’ suffering.
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Image of the boy’s body lying face down on a Turkish beach
The refugee crisis in Europe and the ongoing devastation in Syria gained worldwide attention in September when photos emerged showing a drowned Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, lying facedown on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey. Alan’s father is now asking the world to do what it can to help his fellow refugees.
“I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians,” Abdullah Kurdi told the U.K.’s Channel 4 News in a statement broadcasted on Christmas.
Kurdi was a barber in Kobani, Syria, before he and his family fled to Turkey to escape “barrel bombs, explosions and also Daesh” — another name for the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A Turkish gendarmerie soldier moves Alan Kurdi’s body, which washed ashore on a beach after a boat carrying 12 migrants sank off the coast of Mugla’s Bodrum district on Sept. 2, 2015.
NATO member Turkey shot down a Russian warplane after it violated the country’s airspace near the Syrian border on Tuesday, officials said.
The Russian aircraft was warned 10 times in five minutes before being fired upon, according to the Turkish air force.
A U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad backed the assertion that the Turks warned Russian pilots they were in Turkish airspace before shooting down the aircraft.
“I can confirm that, yes,” Col. Steve Warren told a briefing but could not say whether the incursion was deliberate.
Abu Khaled looked at me across the outdoor hookah café table in the touristy Laleli district of Istanbul. Across the street cars nearly careened into each other every other second in a busy interaction, semi-subterranean shops, their windows half-buried by the pavement, advertised everything from cellphones to toothpaste to the latest designer women’s fashions—or, at any rate, cheap knockoffs for those who didn’t know the difference or much care. Amid the din of an international city at rush hour was the scheduled call of the muezzin, leading the call to prayer, and an unremitting stream of awful European pop music being pumped through the café’s loudspeakers, which we’d asked in vain to have turned down.
Even though ISIS terror had struck inside Turkey the week before, the organization calling itself the Islamic State, al-Dawla al-Islamiya, felt very far away. Truly, Abu Khaled told me, the people who run it want their subjects to live as if in a world of their own, captive minds in a closed society. But the real world is a small place, and this defector from the ISIS intelligence services said he was not the only one who had grown restive.
The blasts hit a peace rally by leftists and Kurdish activists.
Two bomb explosions targeted a peace rally Saturday by leftist and Kurdish activists in the Turkish capital of Ankara, killing 86 people and wounding 186, the country’s health minister said.
The explosions occurred seconds apart outside Ankara’s main train station as hundreds were gathering for the rally, organized by Turkey’s public sector workers’ union and other civic society groups. The rally aimed to call for increased democracy and an end to the renewed violence between Kurdish rebels and Turkish security forces.
“I tried to help but everyone was in pieces,” Ismet, a 56-year-old Turkish animator who survived the attack with his wife and child, told The WorldPost at the scene, still covered in the blood of other people.
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Credit: Burhan Ozbilici/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The bombings were the deadliest attacks in Turkey for years.
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On April 24, 1915, Ottoman Turkish authorities hauled off Daniel Varoujan, a leading Armenian poet of the time, along with over 200 other intellectuals in the capital Constantinople. To the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the poets, painters, writers, booksellers and politicians at the beating heart of the Armenian community posed too much of a threat.
Soon, much of the empire’s Christian Armenian population would be targeted and nearly wiped out, accused of conspiring against the empire with the Russians. Many Armenians say the genocide was collective punishment for the actions of a few.
In August, after a wave of deportations began that would force hundreds of thousands of Armenians on brutal death marches toward the Syrian desert, Varoujan was tortured to death, according to eyewitnesses at the time. Varoujan was just one of many men, women and children who lost their lives.
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Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks during the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
Turkey is investigating an alleged plot to assassinate Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, and has stepped up security around the patriarchate in Istanbul, his spokesman said on Friday. Spokesman Dositheos Anagnostopoulos said the patriarch had not received any direct threats but had learned of the alleged plot from Turkish media, which was later confirmed to the patriarchate by Turkish police.
“Later in the day, police informed the patriarchate of a possible threat and dispatched additional police officers,” Anagnostopoulos said.
Turkish broadcaster NTV said one man had been arrested in relation to the alleged plot, after state prosecutors in central Kayseri province received an anonymous letter saying there was a plan to assasinate Bartholomew on May 29, the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of present-day Istanbul.
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Image of the boy’s body lying face down on a Turkish beach
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