On Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square [6] outside the city’s Blue Mosque killing ten German citizens and injuring dozens.
Graphic images began to surface immediately on social media including the following two visuals which depict the moment of the explosion and the immediate aftermath:
There was little question that ISIS would be blamed. The PKK has largely eschewed civilian attacks of late, preferring instead to fight the army directly in the southeast.
Sure enough, just a little over an hour after the blast, security authorities said an Islamic State-linked suicide bomber was behind the explosion. Just 45 minutes later, Erdogan said the attacker was “of Syrian origin.”
On Wednesday we learn that the attacker was one Nabil Fadli, a Syrian national born in (surprise!) Saudi Arabia in 1988. Fadli was fingerprinted in Turkey just last week while registering as a refugee.
“Mr. Fadli’s apparent ability to enter Turkey, register with immigration officials and carry out the attack without triggering any international terror alerts is likely to fuel concerns that Islamic State extremists are exploiting the migrant crisis [7]to sneak across borders to stage attacks,” WSJ writes [8]. "When he was fingerprinted, Mr. Fadli said he had been smuggled into Turkey from Syria five days earlier [while] Adnan Alhussen, a Syrian opposition activist, said Mr. Fadli had been part of a rebel group near Aleppo that joined Islamic State in 2014, when it took over his town."
Here are images which purport to show Fadli at the registration center:
Clearly, this will do nothing to calm Europe's increasingly frayed nerves vis-a-vis Syrian asylum seekers.
Meanwhile, Ankara has arrested multiple suspected "terrorists" in the wake of the attack and in a hilarious "coincidence", some of the detainees are Russians.
"Since the attack, police have detained a total of 65 people including 16 foreign nationals in six Turkish cities, the Dogan news agency reported," Reuters reported [9], earlier today. "The Russian foreign ministry confirmed three of those detained were Russian nationals, but it was not immediately clear whether there was any connection to the Istanbul attack, for which there has been no claim of responsibility."
The question now is this: is Erdogan set to engineer a connection between Russia and the Istanbul attack in a desperate attempt to turn the tables on Moscow and tie Russian nationals to ISIS? If so, one wonders if Ankara knew the attack was imminent. Some have suggested that last year's blasts in Ankara and Suruc were false flags designed to give Erdogan the PR cover he needed to launch his own "war" on "terror" and restore AKP's supremacy in a redo election. Could there be a similar dynamic at play here?
On that note, we close with a quote from Deutsche Welle [10]:
Turkey's intelligence services had warned security forces twice of the possibility of attacks on foreign tourists in the last few weeks, Turkish newspaper Hürriyet said on Wednesday.
