WSJ
WORLD
Deadly Explosion Hits Busy Istanbul Pedestrian Street
Blast kills six, wounds 81 others on the city’s European side
Members of a forensics team work the scene of the explosion on Istanbul’s Istiklal street.
PHOTO: YASIN AKGUL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
By Jared Malsin
and Elvan Kivilcim
Updated Nov. 13, 2022 3:36 pm ET
ISTANBUL—A bomb blast ripped through a busy pedestrian street in the heart of Istanbul on Sunday afternoon, killing at least six people and wounding 81 others, Turkish officials said.
The blast occurred just after 4 p.m. on Istiklal, a vast canyon of a street lined with restaurants and shops on Istanbul’s European side, sending crowds of tourists running for their lives. Sirens could be heard wailing in the aftermath of the explosion.
Police, some in riot gear, blocked off the street. Armored vehicles rumbled along the largely empty avenue, which would normally be packed with shoppers and tourists on a warm Sunday afternoon. A police helicopter roared overhead.
Turkey’s vice president, Fuat Oktay, speaking on live television, said a female assailant had detonated a bomb in what he described as an act of terror.
“Attempts to submit Turkey and Turkish people by acts of terrorism are doomed to fail today as they were in the past,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference before his departure for the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia. “Our nation shall rest assured that the perpetrators of the incident on Istiklal street will be punished as befitting.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Istiklal street is a long pedestrian boulevard frequented by foreign tourists and locals.
PHOTO: KEMAL ASLAN/RUETERS
The bombing was the first such attack in years in Turkey, which was the target of a catastrophic series of gun and bomb attacks by Islamic State from 2015 to 2017. Extremist militants attacked Istanbul’s main international airport, tourist areas and a nightclub in an era of violence and instability resulting from the wars in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
That previous series of attacks, along with a failed military coup attempt in 2016, badly hurt Turkey’s tourist industry and devastated the country’s economy. The country has also waged a decadeslong struggle with Kurdish militants who have carried out bombings primarily targeting the country’s security services.
The blast also poses a new challenge for Mr. Erdogan, who survived a coup attempt and governed Turkey throughout the 2015-17 wave of terrorist attacks. The Turkish president this year has expanded his role in international affairs by playing an intermediary role during the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Turkish economy is also struggling with a currency crisis and one of the world’s highest rates of inflation, largely because of policies implemented by Mr. Erdogan’s government, economists say.
The attack struck at the cosmopolitan center of Istanbul’s cultural and commercial capital. Istiklal street is a long pedestrian boulevard frequented by foreign tourists and locals. Numerous foreign diplomatic missions are located in the area. The bombing coincided with one of the busiest times of the week, when thousands of people converge on the area’s restaurants, cafes and designer shops.
Cihan Ilter, the owner of a restaurant near the site of the blast, said he was on his way to work when the explosion occurred. “I witnessed a scene of chaos,” he said. “Everybody in the crowd of mostly tourists was running to find a safe place.”
Turkey’s justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, said that eight prosecutors and two deputy prosecutors had been assigned to an investigation into the blast and vowed to catch the perpetrators.
Mr. Bozdag said that officials were investigating whether the bomb, possibly concealed in a plastic bag, was remote detonated.
In March 2016, a suicide bombing on Istklal Street killed five people. A Turkish man who went to Syria and joined Islamic State carried out the bombing and four other Turkish citizens were convicted of murder in connection with the explosion.
Police directed pedestrians away from the site of the blast on Sunday.
PHOTO: YASIN AKGUL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In the years since the previous wave of terrorist attacks, Turkey has largely sealed its border with Syria and gone on the offensive against both Islamic State and Kurdish militants. The U.S. and local Syrian forces dislodged Islamic State from its last territorial foothold in Syria in 2019.
Aaron Stein, a security expert with War on the Rocks, a national-security analysis publication, said the 2015 and 2016 attacks were unique as a spillover from Syria. “With Syria more or less bottled up, this would seem to be something different,” he said. “The dynamics from that previous time are not in place.”
In Washington, the White House condemned the attack, calling it an “act of violence.”
“We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our NATO Ally Turkiye in countering terrorism,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement.
Turkish authorities restricted access to social-media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook in the aftermath of the explosion, according to network data gathered by NetBlocks, an international watchdog group that monitors internet disruptions. Turkish authorities have slowed access to social-media sites during previous attacks.
The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office also launched an investigation into what it said were negative reports about the explosion on social-media accounts, according to Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu.
Turkey’s media regulator on Sunday imposed a ban on broadcasting images of the explosions or reports of the attack other than government statements.
Turkish security forces arrested a senior Islamic State leader, Bashar Khattab Ghazal al-Sumaidai, known by the nomme de guerrre Abu Zeid, in an operation by Turkish intelligence and Istanbul police, Mr. Erdogan said in September.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com
(AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES) Turkish police arrest suspect...
