Shortly before 10pm on Tuesday, two suicide attackers opened fire at a security checkpoint of the international terminal in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. A third attacker set off explosives in the nearby parking lot, before setting off his own. The two gunmen inside the building did the same, creating two massive explosions. The three men were killed instantly.
Original accounts declared 38 people dead, and around 88 wounded, though those numbers have risen to 41 and 239 respectively. The identities and nationalities of many of the victims are still being discovered, but so far there are reports of 23 Turkish victims, 5 Saudi, 2 Iraqi, and 1 Chinese, Jordanian, Tunisian, Uzbek, Iranian, Ukrainian and Palestinian. Of the 239 people injured, 128 remain hospitalized and include nationals of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Switzerland.
The Istanbul Ataturk Airport is the third busiest airport in Europe, and the 11th busiest in the world with around 62 million passengers each year. Though the airport was closed Tuesday after the attack, it has since opened again, albeit with many cancellations and delays, as well as, heavily armed security making rounds through the terminals. Cleaners are working on fixing the parts of the terminal that were damaged due to the bombs, and most of the glass and blood that victims reported running through has now disappeared. “Everything's quite calm right now, which is a little surreal as opposed to the scenes we saw here last night," witness Laurence Cameron said Wednesday. "I was in the airport this morning looking for my lost luggage," he said. "They were sweeping up debris, and someone had hung up a big Turkish flag, pretty much right at the spot where (a) bomb had gone off -- sort of an act of defiance, which was quite moving."
According to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of Turkey, early indications pointed to an operation carried out by the Islamic State (commonly known as ISIS or ISIL), but as of early Wednesday, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, the method of the attacks bears striking similarities to the attacks on Paris’ Bataclan concert hall and the Brussels Airport, both of which were claimed by the Islamic State. Kurdish rebels have also been considered as the ones responsible, as they have a long history of posing attacks on Turkey. However, many Turkish officials doubt that the rebels had anything to do with it, and are focusing on the Islamic State due to the nature of the attack. Because the culprits are unknown, it is still not clear who exactly the targets of the attack were, or why the attack has taken place.
