AFTER a year of terrorist attacks and a violent coup attempt, Istanbul residents are getting used to the sound of explosions. When blasts rang out near the city’s best-known nightclub just after 1am on January 1st, some thought they were new-year pyrotechnics. Yet the skies above them were empty. A massacre was unfolding below. By the time it was over at least 39 people, mostly foreigners, were dead, and dozens more wounded. Autopsies suggested that many had been shot at close range. Some saved themselves by leaping into the Bosporus. As The Economist went to press the attacker, a suspected follower of Islamic State (IS), had not been caught.
IS has carried out at least eight big attacks in Turkey, including the deadliest in the country’s history, a suicide-bombing that killed more than 100 people in October 2015. The nightclub attack is the first it has undisputedly claimed. In an online statement the group praised the shooting as an attack on an “apostate” celebration and revenge for a Turkish offensive against it in Syria. Turkey’s army cleared IS from strongholds overlooking the border in early September, and...Continue reading
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