2016 Atatürk Airport attack

2016 Atatürk Airport attack
Part of Turkey–ISIL conflict
Airside of Terminal 2, where the landside attack took place.
Atatürk Airport Atatürk Airport (Istanbul) Show map of Istanbul Atatürk Airport Atatürk Airport (Turkey) Show map of Turkey
Location	Atatürk Airport, Istanbul, Turkey
Date	28 June 2016 ~22:00 (EEST)
Target	Civilians and security personnel at Atatürk Airport
Attack type	Suicide bombings, mass shooting
Weapons	Kalashnikov rifles, Semtex explosive vests
Deaths	48 (including 3 perpetrators)
Non-fatal injuries	More than 230
Assailants	Rakim Bulgarov Vadim Osmanov Third unnamed suicide bomber
Suspected perpetrators	Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
No. of participants	At least 3 (all deceased)

A terrorist attack, consisting of shootings and suicide bombings, occurred on 28 June 2016 at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey. Gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosive belts staged a simultaneous attack at the international terminal of Terminal 2. Forty-five people were killed, in addition to the three attackers, and more than 230 people were injured.

Media reports indicated that the three attackers were believed by Turkish officials to have come from Russia and Central Asia.

Turkish officials said the attackers were acting on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant and had come to Turkey from ISIL-controlled Syria. Commentators suggested that the attacks may have been related to stepped-up pressure against the group by Turkish authorities. No one claimed responsibility for the attack.

Istanbul had already been subjected to three terrorist attacks in the first half of 2016, including suicide attacks in January and in March that were both linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and a car bombing in early June claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), a "radical offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)".

After the attack, the CIA director John O. Brennan said that the attack bore the hallmarks of an ISIL terror attack. It was suggested that Turkey was paying a price for former Prime Minister and now President Recip Tayyip Erdoğan's wilful blindness to ISIL threat, and that Turkey, after previously being a conduit for fighters joining ISIL, was beginning to feel the wrath of the group for taking a harder line. The Washington Post wrote that "perhaps not by chance, what was merely the latest in a series of Islamic State attacks inside Turkey came just as its impulsive and increasingly autocratic president was moving to repair his regime’s threadbare foreign relations."