THE morning after the suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport, a grim silence hung over the normally bustling terminal. One explosion had blown off several windows and hundreds of square metres of roof panels. A pile of glass and columns pockmarked by bullets marked the site of another blast. Taxi drivers idled outside, waving down the few shocked passengers who trickled out of the building. Flights had resumed.
The three suicide bombers who attacked the airport, Istanbul’s gateway to the world, on Tuesday evening killed at least 41 people and left 239 wounded. Early signs suggested that Islamic State (IS) had a role in the bombing, said Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim.
According to officials and witnesses, at least one of the attackers opened fire with an AK-47 machine gun before detonating his suicide vest inside the arrivals terminal, just outside the luggage pickup area. Another struck near the X-ray scanners by the departures hall entrance, the third at a nearby car park. All three had arrived at the airport by taxi.
Security camera footage from the arrivals hall shows panicked travellers running for cover, trailed by one of the bombers. Gunned down at close range by a police officer, the attacker loses control of his own weapon, falls to the ground and blows himself up.
IS attacks have killed nearly 200 people in Turkey since last summer. The group last struck in late April, when a suicide bomber killed two people outside a police station in Gaziantep, in the country’s south. Since the start of the year, rockets fired from IS strongholds in Syria have killed another 21 people in Kilis, a town near the border. The interior ministry claims to have foiled dozens of other attacks, including a plan to bomb bars and night clubs in Ankara, the country’s capital, on New Year’s Eve. In an indictment drawn up earlier this week, prosecutors demanded life sentences for 36 people suspected of involvement in an IS attack that killed 101 people in Ankara last October.
With the exception of the murders of at least five Syrian activists, IS has not claimed responsibility for any of its attacks inside Turkey. Its publications and social-media accounts, however, have vilified Turkey ever since the country decided last year to open its airbases to coalition jets operating against IS in Syria.
By targeting Ataturk Airport, one of the world’s busiest, the attackers appeared determined to damage Turkey’s $30 billion-a-year tourism industry. Hotels and resorts are already reeling from a Russian boycott, earlier IS bombings and the war in the Kurdish southeast, as well as terror attacks by an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Foreign arrivals were down by 35% on last year’s figures in May, the largest such drop in decades.
The days leading up to the attack offered some hope of a respite for Turkish tourism. On Monday, Mr Yildirim announced a deal to restore diplomatic relations with Israel after a six-year hiatus. Under the agreement, Israel will compensate the families of ten Turkish activists killed by its troops during a 2010 raid on a flotilla carrying supplies to the Gaza Strip. It will also allow Turkey to send aid to Gaza. On the same day, Turkey’s president signed a letter apologising for the downing of a Russian plane last November. The incident prompted Moscow to impose an embargo on Turkish food products and restrict travel to the country. For tourism, hope of a recovery has now been replaced by fear of a further contraction.
To some in Turkey, the timing suggests that the attack was a response to the agreement with Israel. Yet security experts find it hard to imagine that the attackers could have planned and pulled off an attack as complex as this one in a matter of days. “It may be that they had this going and decided to accelerate,” says Selim Koru, a researcher at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV). Regardless of the truth, if Turkish voters interpret the attack as a retaliation, it could make Mr Erdogan’s efforts to re-normalise the country’s international relations harder to pursue.