This is a British man injured in the blast; he was queueing outside the Embassy with his Turkish fiancee, who was found alive in the rubble today with severe head and chest injuries.
Horrifying.
Posted on 11/21/2003 5:02:39 PM PST by Pokey78
The sky is a brilliant blue, the leaves are beginning to turn, the weather is warm all day with an agreeable crispness in the air as it gets dark: the nicest season of the year.
Ramadan finished yesterday, culminating, when the fast was broken at dusk, in Kadir, the first of nine nights of feasting, Christmas and Easter rolled into one: houses spring-cleaned, everyone togged up in smart new outfits, getting ready for the customary festive visits to relatives and friends.
And instead, after four massive bomb blasts in central Istanbul in six days, the mood, one resident said, "is surreal". If some people are cowering in their homes, enough are out and about to give a convincing impression of robust normality. This huge, ancient, dynamic city continues to throb with vitality. But a festive mood? Emphatically not.
Around the site of the blasts, it was instead one of raw anger yesterday. "These are Turks," said one woman, "killing fellow-Muslims, in the holy month of Ramadan - what could be worse than that?"
A jeweller, his business shattered by a bomb, said: "If we could get hold of the people who did this, we would tear them in pieces with our bare hands."
"It's not total panic," said Selin Alpauti, a journalist in the city, "because this is not new to us, we've had terrorist bombings in the past. And things are always going wrong in Turkey. It is not so much fear that is in the air as anger."
How the staff of the British consulate were taking it could only be guessed: all requests for interviews were rebuffed after an order came down to shut out the media.
Other British residents got on with their lives, vowing to stay put in a city whose economic vibrancy far outweighs its perils, at least for now.
But outside the British consulate in the city's traditional commercial heart, where 16 of the 27 victims of Thursday's attacks died, the mood of anger was palpable.
At shortly after 11 o'clock on Thursday morning, a lorry loaded with 500lb of explosives came rumbling down the narrow, shop-lined lane that leads to the entrance of the consulate, smashed through the steels gates and exploded, destroying the security guards' offices at the entrance and the consulate staff's temporary offices beyond.
The blast was so violent that many people in the city were convinced it was an earthquake, a perennial risk in Istanbul.
Yesterday the whole lane was cordoned off by police, and a small, sombre crowd composed mostly of men and women who worked in the shops' lanes gathered by the barrier and gazed at the devastation.
"I had just come out of the textile shop where I work when the bomb went off," said Mesrutiyet Caddesi. "I'd just turned the corner, it missed me by five minutes. One of our colleagues was killed, they're sending him back to his home town for burial."
Another man said: "I was having my breakfast when it happened. I thought it was a gas canister exploding, we all did at first. Yesterday we were all in confusion, today it's pure anger."
The man who worked in the jeweller's shop in the lane said: "We're not ourselves. We're doing everything automatically, out of habit. Anger is what I feel more than fear. One of my colleagues had an artery in his neck severed, she died from loss of blood. The whole of my life is under the rubble. I will carry this anger with me for the rest of my life."
Merlut Zeren, an accountant, said: "I don't know if we are going to celebrate the feast or not. Everybody is in a strange frame of mind. See these offices round here? They're all empty, people don't dare to go to work.
"The shopping malls are all empty, nobody wants to take the risk. I'm alive by purest chance myself - I was just down the street in a hotel when the bomb went off. I could also have been hit by the synagogue bomb [last Saturday], I go down that street four times a day."
Back-to-back explosions are one of the hallmarks of al- Qa'ida, if that is who was responsible. Killing fellow Muslims is an inhibition the terrorists shook off only recently. Go back a couple of years and there were many Muslims who argued that suicide bombings were unIslamic. Steadily there are some prepared to wind the ratchet, pushing back the limits of what they are prepared to do for Jihad.
But if the enemy is formidable, Turks, after their 15-year war against Kurdish separatists, in which 40,000 died, are neither innocent nor squeamish about terrorism.
Ten minutes on foot from the British consulate is the even narrower lane that houses one of the two synagogues blown up in last Saturday's atrocity.
As well as the well defended synagogue, the street is home to dozens of totally unprotected shops selling chandeliers and lampshades: hardly a piece of glass in the whole street survived the explosion. But one week on, they are getting back to business, banging together their shops, bringing in new sheets of plate glass for the shop fronts, with a display of manic energy.
There is a gritty, no-nonsense spirit of determination in this city that reminds one of anecdotes about the Blitz in London's East End.
If Turks regret the day their government became allies of the West, established diplomatic relations with Israel, became an important member of Nato and a close if often awkward friend of the United States - all of which turned them, eventually, into a natural target for al-Qa'ida - that is not what is on their minds this weekend.
Likewise they seem unattracted by theories that it was the war in Iraq that brought terror back to the streets of Istanbul. Despite having its first Islamist government in history, Turkey appears as firmly committed as ever to its own hybrid of Western consumerism and Islam-lite - "a synthesis of East and West" as Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, puts it.
Despite the stoical determination, Turkey will not be the same after these blasts: the armoured personnel carriers on the streets last night, the increased presence of troops, the air of repressed hysteria, all guarantee it.
No representative of a foreign government had been killed in Turkey for 20 years. Never has such a stark message been delivered to Turkey about its present course and its place in the world.
At central Istanbul's biggest public hospital, Thursday's bombs brought in 190 victims for treatment. Last night 13 of them were still being cared for, three of those in intensive care. Dr Suleyman Bayraktar, the doctor in charge, was on duty in the hospital a mile from the British consulate when the bomb went off.
"It was so loud," he said, "that I was convinced it was inside the building, directly above me. And everybody I spoke to, wherever they were in the city at the time, said the same thing: they thought the bomb was inside their own building."
And in a metaphorical sense it was.
They want the guilty perps punished.
They are a little 'wobbly' on execution, but from what I have read, life imprisonment in a Turkish prison is no picnic.
The Turks called the bombers "monsters". I'm not sure how much that means in turkish, but it was not a statement of support.
The Turks I work with are total computer geeks, they can make any computer sit up and beg. They ain't stupid.
By the way, every last one of them came to me on 09/11/01 and told me how wrong it was. One of them (the Kurdish Turk) asked me if I was to be alright. I was leaking big tears at that time.
My reply; "Not now, but I will be alright later."
This is a British man injured in the blast; he was queueing outside the Embassy with his Turkish fiancee, who was found alive in the rubble today with severe head and chest injuries.
Horrifying.
Uh . . . Muslims killing Americans?
Islamic dress is positively discouraged in Turkey, I'm told. I've heard that it's banned in schools.
I hope they come out of it on the side of right.
It could be raining.
Credit must go to the organized secular nature of Turkish society that more of this hasn't occurred in the past. For very many Muslims of certain types, Sharia, for example, is quintessentially both Islamic and bloody.
Yes, to you and me. To muslims, this is a victory for which allah should be praised.
ramadan 2003.
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