Russian Ambassador to Turkey Is
Assassinated in Ankara
By
TIM ARANGO and RICK GLADSTONE DEC. 19, 2016
A man, reported by The Associated
Press to be the gunman, after the shooting of the Russian ambassador, on the
floor, on Monday at a gallery in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Credit Hasim
Kilic/Hurriyet, via Reuters
ISTANBUL
— Russia’s
ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at
an Ankara art exhibit on Monday evening by a lone Turkish gunman shouting “God
is great!” and “don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” in what the leaders
of Turkey and Russia called a provocative terrorist attack.
The
gunman, described by Turkish officials as a 22-year-old off-duty police
officer, also wounded at least three others in the assault on the envoy, Andrey G. Karlov, which was
captured on video. Turkish officials said the assailant was killed by other
officers in a shootout.
The
assassination, an embarrassing security failure in the Turkish capital, forced
Turkey and Russia to confront a new crisis tied directly to the Syrian
conflict, now in its sixth year.
The
longer-term implications for the Russia-Turkey relationship, which had been
warming recently after plunging a year ago, were not immediately clear. But
some analysts played down the notion that the assassination would lead to a new
rupture, saying it could conversely bring the countries closer together in a
shared fight against terrorism.
President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Russian television that Mr. Karlov had been
“despicably killed” to sabotage ties with Turkey. Mr. Putin spoke with the
Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by phone, and the two leaders agreed
to cooperate in investigating the killing, and in combating terrorism broadly.
In
an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top
officials, Mr. Putin said, “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up
the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.”
Mr.
Erdogan, in a speech late Monday night, said the assassination was a
provocation meant to derail efforts by Turkey and Russia to collaborate more
closely on regional issues and economic ties.
“We
know that this is a provocation aiming to destroy the normalization process of
Turkey-Russia relations,” Mr. Erdogan said. “But the Russian government and the
Turkish republic have the will to not fall into that provocation.”
The
assassination came after days of protests by Turks angry over Russia’s support
for the Syrian government in the conflict and the Russian role in the killings
and destruction in Aleppo, the northern Syrian city.
The
Russian envoy was shot from behind and immediately fell to the floor while
speaking at an exhibition of photographs, according to multiple accounts from
the scene, the Contemporary Arts Center in the Cankaya area of Ankara.
The
gunman, wearing a dark suit and tie, was seen in video footage of the assault
waving a pistol and shouting in Arabic: “God is great! Those who pledged
allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!”
Then
he switched to Turkish and shouted: “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!
Step back! Step back! Only death can take me from here.”
Hasim
Kilic, a Turkish photographer for the Hurriyet news organization who witnessed
the attack and sold his images to Reuters, said in a telephone interview that
the gunman had fired seven shots at the ambassador — “four from behind, three
while the body was on the ground” — as guests screamed and scrambled to hide.
Mr.
Kilic, who was crouched behind a cocktail table about 12 feet away, said the
gunman had ordered everyone else out and refused a security guard’s request to
drop his weapon. “Call the police, and I will die here,” Mr. Kilic quoted the
assailant as saying.
Turkish
officials said the gunman was killed after a shootout with Turkish Special
Forces.
He
was identified by Turkey’s interior minister as Mevlut Mert Altintas, from the
western province of Aydin and a graduate of a police college in Izmir. Local
news reports said that Mr. Altintas’s mother and sister had been arrested and
that a computer had been confiscated from their house.
While
it was too early to tell if the gunman acted alone, his use of jihadist slogans
and his invocation of Syria raised the possibility that he was a member, or at
least a sympathizer, of an Islamist group like Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate or
the Islamic State, two organizations that Turkey has been accused by allies,
including the United States, of supporting in the past.
Russia’s
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told the Rossiya 24 news channel
that Mr. Karlov had died of his wounds in what she described as a terrorist
attack. Turkey’s Interior Ministry said the ambassador had died at Guven
Hospital in Ankara.
Russian
news agencies said the ambassador’s wife fainted and was hospitalized after
learning of her husband’s death. They also said that as a precaution, Russian
tourists in Turkey had been advised against leaving their hotel rooms or
visiting public places.
Russia’s
Tass news agency said that Mr. Karlov had been shot from behind while finishing
remarks at the opening of an art exhibition titled “Russia Through Turks’
Eyes.”
Mr.
Karlov, who started his career as a diplomat in 1976, worked extensively in
North Korea over two decades, before changing regions in 2007, according to a biography on the Russian
Embassy’s website. He became ambassador in July 2013.
The
attack was a rare instance of an assassination of a Russian envoy. Historians
said it might have been the first since Pyotr Voykov, a Soviet ambassador to
Poland, was shot to death in Warsaw in 1927.
For
many Russians, the assassination is likely to recall the 19th-century killing
in Tehran of Aleksandr Griboyedov, a poet and diplomat who died after a mob
stormed the Russian Embassy. That episode is remembered as the most severe
insult to Russia’s diplomatic corps in the country’s history.
More
recently, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, now allied with Russia in
Syria, kidnapped four Soviet diplomats in 1985, killing one and releasing three
a month later.
The
United States, which has tangled bitterly with Russia over the Syrian conflict,
quickly condemned the assassination in Ankara. In a statement,
Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “despicable attack, which was also an
assault on the right of all diplomats to safely and securely advance and
represent their nations around the world.”
Other
prominent officials who often criticize Russia’s actions in Syria and elsewhere
also offered their condolences. “No justification for such a heinous act,” Jens
Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, said on
Twitter. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said
he was “appalled by this senseless act of terror.”
President-elect
Donald J. Trump, who has been accused by critics of aligning with Russia, said
in a statement that Mr. Karlov had been “assassinated by a radical Islamic
terrorist.”
The
assassination also illustrated the long reach of the Syrian war. It has
destabilized Europe with hundreds of thousands of refugees, spawned terrorist attacks in Paris and
Brussels, and led to the rise of the Islamic State, which controls territory
across Iraq and Syria.
When
the war began, Turkey was rising and confident, and Mr. Erdogan, then its prime
minister, began supporting rebels seeking the ouster of the Syrian president,
Bashar al-Assad. Preoccupied with bringing Mr. Assad down, Turkey opened its
borders to weapons and fighters flowing to the rebels, turning a blind eye, for
a time, when the opposition turned increasingly Islamist.
As
the war ground on, the consequences for Turkey were profound. It was
overwhelmed with refugees — more than three million now reside in the country —
and the rise of the Islamic State led to terrorist attacks within Turkey’s
borders.
In the fall of 2015, Russia entered
the conflict in support of the Syrian government, reinforcing Mr. Assad at a
weak moment and dealing a blow to Turkey’s ambitions in Syria. Relations
between Turkey and Russia reached a low point in November 2015 after Turkey
shot down a Russian jet near the Syrian border.
But
this year, in an effort to restore relations, Mr. Erdogan, now Turkey’s
president, met with Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg, and ever since the two
countries have largely put aside their differences on Syria and focused on
improving economic ties. In August, when Turkey’s military went into Syria to
push the Islamic State out of the border town of Jarabulus, the move was widely
seen as having been made with the tacit approval of Russia.
For
Turkey, the Ankara attack resonated in the Turkish collective memory: Turkey
lost many diplomats in the 20th century to Armenian militants in a campaign to
avenge the Armenian genocide during World War I.
“Turkey
is very aware of the size of this failure, and I think the government will make
every effort to investigate this fully,” Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish former diplomat
who is the chairman of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an
Istanbul research organization, said of the Russian diplomat’s assassination.
“I don’t expect any crisis between Turkey and Russia.”
Since
the Turkish military incursion into Syria in August, Mr. Erdogan’s criticism of
Russia over Syria had been muted. But Mr. Erdogan faced a dilemma: Even as he
was warming to Russia, he faced a Turkish public, not to mention the Syrian
refugees within Turkey, angry over Russia’s role in the bombing of Aleppo.
On
Monday evening in Istanbul, just after the assassination, a group of protesters
gathered outside the Russian consulate on Istiklal Avenue, the city’s largest
pedestrian street. The gathering was more street theater than protest, with two
men lying on the street, shrouded in bloody sheets and the Syrian flag, and
surrounded by candles, to represent the killings in Aleppo.
Mohammed
al-Shibli, a Syrian activist who participated, said, “I felt extreme happiness
when I heard the news” of the assassination.
He
continued: “This is the first step in getting justice for the Syrian people.
The ambassador is not innocent. He represents the foreign policy of his
murderous state and thus he is a murderer, as well. Now we are waiting for
revenge against everyone who shed blood in Syria.”
The religious leaders of Jesus’ time understood this concept: This
was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not
only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own
Father, making himself equal with God. (
All through his time on earth, Jesus performed miracles. He healed the sick (
