The woman who allegedly planted a bomb yesterday Sunday in the busiest pedestrian street in Istanbul has been captured this morning. This has been announced by the Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, who has also reported the arrest of twenty-one other suspects and has accused the People's Protection Units (YPD), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, of the attack. (PKK). The explosion yesterday left six dead and eighty-one injured, thirty of whom are still hospitalized, with one struggling between life and death.
Soylu also had harsh words towards the United States, a country that arms and supports the YPD in northeastern Syria, as the backbone of the self-styled Syrian Democratic Forces. "The US has expressed its condolences. It is like the murderer who is the first to show up at the scene of the crime."
In the absence of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who is flying to the G-20 summit in Bali - Suleyman Soylu is a man of reference in the Turkish government. His words that there will be "revenge" lead to the expectation of new military actions against the armed organization in northern Syria.
Yesterday's attack shook a packed Istiklal at 4:20 in the afternoon, the former Grand rue de Péra of the Europeans of Constantinople a century ago and today a favorite shopping and leisure destination for tourists from the Middle East. At almost any time of the day and especially on weekends, the road for pedestrians -and for a vintage tram- registers a real human torrent along its 1.4 kilometers and is avoided by many Istanbulites for the same reasons as some Barcelonans avoid the Rambla.
Istanbul had been free of attacks after the massacre of the Reina Club, on the banks of the Bosphorus, on New Year's Eve 2016-17, after two years of terrorist escalation, including a coup attempt. No one in Turkey wants to see anything remotely like it, until the elections six months from now.
