After last night’s suicide attack at Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport, which killed forty-one people and injured more than two hundred others, a question kept nagging at me: Why did the three attackers choose the arrivals hall? Having lived in Istanbul for the past couple of years, I’ve spent a great deal of time at Atatürk, where travellers pass through security before checking in for their flights. The entry-control points at departures are thick with crowds waiting to X-ray their luggage. Those at arrivals are largely empty. When the airport is especially busy, I’ve often entered through arrivals and then hustled upstairs to departures to make a flight. The attack appears likely to be the work of ISIS (as Dexter Filkins explains), but no group has claimed responsibility for it.
Yesterday marked the sixth major terrorist attack in Turkey this year: two previous ones were claimed by ISIS, and three by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. ISIS has most often targeted areas frequented by foreigners, whereas the P.K.K. and its affiliates have favored military and government targets. The response to these events has become almost routine—an increased police presence in public areas, the occasional Metro delay, a round of speeches by members of parliament that assert the nation’s resolve. My routine consists of exchanging e-mails and phone calls with Turkish friends, most of whom have become increasingly resigned to their country’s plunge into ever-deepening cycles of violence. Yesterday and today, they remarked, “We are still alive, trying not to get used to this shit once again,” and “I hope we can all find a way out of this madness.” One friend in Istanbul reminded me of a Turkish proverb: “Feed a crow and it will pluck out your eyes,” lamenting that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, until recently, tolerated the growth of ISIS around the Turkish border with Syria.
This is the month of Ramadan, which may have played a role in the timing of yesterday’s attack. Shaheeds, or martyrs, believe that they will receive greater rewards in the afterlife if they sacrifice themselves during the holy month. Just ten days ago, also during Ramadan, about two dozen men entered Velvet IndieGround, a record store in Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Çihangir neighborhood, and beat up people who had gathered there for a Radiohead album-launch party. The record-store staff said that the men were angry that the store was playing music and serving beer during Ramadan.
The government response was feeble: two of the attackers were detained and then released within forty-eight hours. When hundreds of Turks gathered in protest the next night, at nearby Firuzağa Square, riot police dispersed them with tear gas and water cannons, largely ignoring the mob that subsequently entered the square wielding canes and chanting “Takbeer” and “Allahu akbar.” After the protest, the authorities cancelled the following weekend’s Istanbul gay-pride parade, the largest in the Middle East, citing security concerns following the attacks in Orlando.
When L.G.B.T. groups took to the streets anyway, this past Sunday, the police quickly dispersed them with a fusillade of rubber bullets and clouds of tear gas. Erdoğan, at this point, faces open hostility from secular Turks while retaining high approval ratings among his rural and largely religious base.
When arriving at Atatürk, I would often pause by the taxi stand to take a few minutes of fresh air before battling the traffic back to my apartment. I wasn’t the only one who would do this. There would always be a small international gathering before the travellers went their separate ways. Asian businessmen and European tourists would bum cigarettes from one another after a long flight, ask the Turks for directions into town, perhaps decide to split the high fare on a cab into the Sultanahmet or Beyoğlu districts. This is right where one of the bombs went off. I can’t help but imagine that such an assembly is exactly what the attackers intended to target.
