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| Quite the Fortress, eh? (image from a travel blog) |
CBS News had a good report on today's incident of shots fired at the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, along with some good video.
Briefly, two Turkish women fired several shots at the consulate office building, after which one escaped and the other - a 42-year old, which surprises me - was wounded by return fire from Turkish police and subsequently captured inside a nearby building where she hid. According to all reports I've seen so far, no one else was injured.
The organization to which the captured women belong, Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), has been on the Department of State Terrorist Group List since 1997. DHKP-C also carried out the 2013 suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, which killed a locally-engaged employee of the embassy.
Our consulate in Istanbul was relocated from its highly vulnerable previous location into a big ol' forbidding Fortress high on a hill several years ago, and that secure new facility helped to make today's shooting the fairly harmless thing it was. It certainly could have been worse; today's other attack by DHKP-C was a complex action in which a vehicle-borne bomb at a police station was followed up with small arms attacks on police as they responded to the bomb.
Since this failed attack puts me in a happy mood, here's a happy tune - Istanbul, not Constantinople (why they changed it I can’t say - people just liked it better that way) by The Four Lads.
Yeah, that was a 1950s song, long before They Might Be Giants covered it.