Latest attack leaves feeling of vulnerability; more than 200 deaths in eight months
ISTANBUL – At least thirty-eight people have been killed and 125 wounded in yet another suicide car bombing in downtown Ankara, this one indiscriminately targeting civilians on Sunday.
Reyhan, a 27-year-old language instructor who declined to give her last name, had exited the subway station at the scene of the attack and entered nearby shops right before the bomb went off.
“I heard a big boom and dust fell off the ceiling. Everybody stopped and started screaming,” she told The Media Line between sobs over the phone. “I turned back and saw the flames. There were at least five cars aflame […] I saw some people lying on the ground. I think they were dead bodies.”
Ankara’s central Kızılay area, a major transport hub where the bombing occurred at around 6:45 P.M., had reportedly been full of young people taking the national university entrance exam.
Ahmed Ben, a 28-year-old Tunisian graduate student and language teacher who lives and works just next to the site of the blast, saw a ball of fire rising into the air outside his window during a lesson.
“When I went outside, there was complete hysteria,” Ben told The Media Line over Skype. People were crying, some were shouting anti-government slogans, and others were trying to cross police barriers.
“I saw an old lady just grabbing the arms of a policeman and asking him what the hell is going on and how could you allow such things to happen,” Ben said.
Over 200 have now been killed in bombings in cities and towns across Turkey since last June, and this massacre was only the latest in a string of attacks on Turkey’s capital.
A suicide bombing of military buses on February 17 just a few blocks away from Sunday’s attack killed 12 soldiers, 12 civilians working for the military, and a journalist. It was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) militant group.
Last October, a bombing blamed on the Islamic State killed 106 people, mostly leftists and Kurdish activists, at a peace march in central Ankara.
Ben said that before this bombing, “people [in Ankara] still felt safe somehow,” because only military personnel or political demonstrators were targeted.
But with this attack, “there was no discrimination anymore between civilians or military, pro-this or pro-that,” he said. “People right now feel very vulnerable. Nobody feels safe.”
Residents of Turkey’s capital aren’t accustomed to such bloodshed.
“Even in the worst phase of the Kurdish insurgency in the 1990s, an attack like this in Ankara would be unthinkable,” wrote Akın Ünver, an Ankara native and international relations professor at Kadir Has University, in an e-mail.
Ünver says that several large, politically-motivated purges of state security agencies since 2008 have damaged their abilities to function.
“This impairs institutional trust, coordination and key security cooperation such as inter-institutional intelligence sharing,” he said.
Furthermore, Ünver said, the government often responds to these bombings by playing politics.
“After all the terrorist attacks, the government spent more time blaming the opposition than focusing on the culprits or preventing further attacks. That is exceedingly problematic.”
Less than an hour after the attack, a court ordered a ban on all news related to the blast.
Two days before Sunday’s attack the United States Embassy released a warning about a potential attack on government buildings a few miles away from the blast site, though Turkish authorities apparently gave no such warnings to their own citizens.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the bombing would only strengthen the resolve of Turkey’s security forces.
On Monday, officials declared that one of the dead appeared to be a female Kurdish activist linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, though no organization has claimed the attack. Also on Monday, Turkish jets bombed 18 PKK targets in Iraq’s Qandil Mountains.
The PKK hasn’t targeted large groups of civilians for decades, though TAK, which many speculate has links to the PKK, does target non-combatants. TAK, which claimed the February 17 bombing in Ankara, has pledged to stage more attacks across Turkey in response to the government’s often brutal war with PKK-linked groups in the southeast.
Human rights groups say over 200 civilians have been killed in the fighting, which resumed last June after a two-year ceasefire.
Ahmed Ben, the teacher, said that central Ankara was rainy and empty on Monday, and all his students cancelled their classes.
“I went outside a couple of minutes ago and it’s completely deserted,” he said. “You can really feel the fear.”