July 9 — one strange day. There was morning coffee accompanied by pictures of dead bodies and some injured people after some sort of attack on the Istanbul US Consulate compound and lunch with more on the compound story PLUS reports of 3 Germans kidnapped in Eastern Turkey along with a report of a bomb on an airplane flying from Eastern to Western Turkey. All of the news channels were covering all 3 — including the 5 Eng. language news channels.
Of course, the same basic info was being repeated over and over: 3 of the 4 Consulate attackers were killed and 1 got away in a car. It seems the dead guys carried cell phones (which sounds dumb to me) so identifying them wasn’t hard. They were Turkish guys. 1 of the Consulate security guys and 2 policeman (all Turkish) were also killed. Not that long ago I was at that Consulate getting my replacement passport for the one lost with my stolen purse. But, this was another day with a shoot-out in the area near the entrance and the parking area with the Consulate's high-quality cameras filming the whole thing.
The area nearby is a busy one with homes and shops. The compound is on a hill surrounded by thick walls and looks like some sort of bullet-proof/bomb-proof prison, castle, or fort depending on your literary interests. The attackers shot at the bullet-proof guardhouse near the parked cars until they were shot by the security people and the police. Strangely, there
Strangely, there was little likelihood of the attackers ever getting inside the Consulate.
Security starts while you are outside.
Once you are let in, you get checked by the security people inside, and then you wait again before you can leave that area which is a BUILDING separate from the next part of the compound - which I assume also has parts that are underground.
If those attackers didn’t know this much, then again they were pretty dumb.
was little likelihood of the attackers ever getting inside the Consulate. Security starts while you are outside. Once you are let in, you get checked by the security people inside, and then you wait again before you can leave that area which is a BUILDING separate from the next part of the compound — which I assume also has parts that are underground. If those attackers didn’t know this much, then again they were pretty dumb.
The emerging explanation is that an Afghan al-Qaeda® group has claimed that they did it. This means that either an actual group that the US and Turkish officials have agreed to call al-Qaeda® did it, the 4 amateur attackers thought they’d be heroes of some sort, or the 4 attackers were sort of dumb guys who were sent in to get killed by an intelligence agency using the al-Qaeda® name for an operation intended to cause a little more chaos in the already tense Turkey OR to make the more traditional religious people in Turkey who support the AK party and therefore the AK party itself look bad, i.e. putting more screws on Turkey to get the desired behaviors — I figure it was an operation.
There haven’t been any updates on the other 2 stories. They could be PKK/Kurdish related since a lot of the Kurds live in Eastern Turkey. Then, it is was dinner time and a chance to finally turn to the Internet for the bad news elsewhere. Of course, for good measure I "had to" watch a late night summary and discussion of the day's events.
