Ankara Blast Echoes Past Attacks in Türkiye

Members of Turkish Police Special Forces secure the area near the Interior Ministry following a bomb attack in Ankara, on October 1, 2023, leaving two police officers injured. (AFP)
Members of Turkish Police Special Forces secure the area near the Interior Ministry following a bomb attack in Ankara, on October 1, 2023, leaving two police officers injured. (AFP)
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Ankara Blast Echoes Past Attacks in Türkiye

Members of Turkish Police Special Forces secure the area near the Interior Ministry following a bomb attack in Ankara, on October 1, 2023, leaving two police officers injured. (AFP)
Members of Turkish Police Special Forces secure the area near the Interior Ministry following a bomb attack in Ankara, on October 1, 2023, leaving two police officers injured. (AFP)

Türkiye’s interior minister said on Sunday that two terrorists carried out a bomb attack in front of the ministry buildings in Ankara, adding one of them died in the explosion and the other was "neutralized" by authorities there.

The bombing, the first to hit Ankara in a number of years, comes almost a year after six people were killed and 81 wounded in an explosion in a busy pedestrian street in central Istanbul on Nov 13, 2022.

Türkiye blamed Kurdish militants for the Istanbul blast, which reminded Turks of a wave of attacks carried out by various militant groups in Turkish cities between mid-2015 and early 2017.

Following are some of those deadly attacks:

Jan 5, 2017 - A Turkish police officer and a courthouse employee were killed by a car bomb in the Aegean coastal city of Izmir while at least 10 people were wounded. Authorities said Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants were behind the attack.

Dec 31, 2016 - ISIS claimed responsibility for a New Year's Day mass shooting in which 39 people were killed after a lone gunman opened fire in a packed Istanbul nightclub.

Dec 17, 2016 - A car bomb killed 13 soldiers and wounded 56 when it tore through a bus carrying off-duty military personnel in the central city of Kayseri. An offshoot of the PKK claimed responsibility for the attack.

Dec 10, 2016 - Twin bombings, one planted in a car and the other strapped to a suicide bomber, killed 44 people, most of them police officers, and wounded more than 150 outside an Istanbul soccer stadium. A PKK offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), claimed responsibility for the attack.

Aug 26, 2016 - A suicide truck bombing at a police headquarters in Türkiye’s largely Kurdish southeast killed at least 11 and wounded dozens. The PKK claimed responsibility for the attack.

Aug 20, 2016 - A suicide bomber carried out an attack on a wedding party in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep that killed at least 51 people. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the attacker had worked with the ISIS.

June 28, 2016 - A triple suicide bombing and a gun attack killed 45 people and wounded more than 160 people at Istanbul's main airport. Türkiye handed down life sentences to people linked to the perpetrators of the attack, believed to have been involved with ISIS.

May 12, 2016 - Explosives that detonated in a village in southeastern Türkiye killed 16 people, had been intended for use in a suicide bombing in the nearby province of Diyarbakir. Kurdish militants were believed to have been transporting the explosives, security sources have said.

March 19, 2016 - A suicide bomber killed four people in a busy shopping district of Istiklal Street in the heart of Istanbul. Authorities confirmed three Israelis, two of them holding dual US citizenship, and an Iranian citizen died as a result of the blast. Authorities said a Turkish member of the ISIS group was responsible for the bombing.

March 13, 2016 - Thirty-seven people were killed when a bomb-laden car exploded at a crowded transport hub in the heart of the Turkish capital Ankara.

Feb 17, 2016 - Twenty-eight people were killed and dozens wounded in Ankara when a car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses near the armed forces' headquarters, parliament and other government buildings.

Jan 12, 2016 - A suicide bomber killed at least 10 people, most of them German tourists, in Istanbul's historic heart in an attack then authorities blamed on ISIS.

Oct 10, 2015 - Twin bombings in Ankara killed more than 100 people outside the city's main train station. Turkish courts jailed perpetrators, who are believed to be linked to the ISIS, for life.

Sept 8, 2015 - Kurdish militants killed 15 police officers in two bombings in eastern Turkish provinces of Mardin and Igdir.

July 20, 2015 - An ISIS suicide bomber killed more than 30 people, mostly young students, in an attack on the mainly ethnic Kurdish town of Suruc near the Syrian border.



Derided as Dull, Keir Starmer Becomes UK Prime Minister with a Sensational Victory

 05 July 2024, United Kingdom, London: Newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria outside No 10 Downing Street after the Labour party won a landslide victory at the 2024 General Election. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/dpa)
05 July 2024, United Kingdom, London: Newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria outside No 10 Downing Street after the Labour party won a landslide victory at the 2024 General Election. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/dpa)
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Derided as Dull, Keir Starmer Becomes UK Prime Minister with a Sensational Victory

 05 July 2024, United Kingdom, London: Newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria outside No 10 Downing Street after the Labour party won a landslide victory at the 2024 General Election. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/dpa)
05 July 2024, United Kingdom, London: Newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria outside No 10 Downing Street after the Labour party won a landslide victory at the 2024 General Election. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/dpa)

For someone often derided as dull, Keir Starmer has delivered a sensational election result.

Starmer led Britain's Labour Party to a landslide election victory, and on Friday became the country's 58th prime minister — the first leader from the center-left party to win a UK national election since Tony Blair, who won three in a row starting in 1997.

It's the latest reinvention for a man who went from human rights attorney to hard-nosed prosecutor and from young radical to middle-aged pragmatist.

Like Blair, who refashioned the party as "New Labour" in the 1990s, 61-year-old Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory over Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in Thursday’s election after dragging the party towards the political middle ground.

He won by promising voters change, but also calm, vowing to restore stability to public life and give Britain "the sunlight of hope" after 14 years of turmoil under the Conservatives.

"People look at Starmer and they see this guy who is very solid, clearly very able in his professional life," said Douglas Beattie, author of "How Labour Wins (and Why it Loses)."

"I think people want that caution, they want that stability."

A former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, Starmer has often been caricatured by Conservative opponents as a "lefty London lawyer." He was knighted for his role leading the Crown Prosecution Service, and opponents like to use his title, Sir Keir Starmer, to paint him as elite and out of touch.

While most prime ministers are awarded knighthoods, damehoods — the female equivalent — or other royal honors after their time in office, Starmer is the first knight of the realm to become the country's leader since Sir Alec Douglas-Hume in 1963.

Starmer prefers to stress his humble roots and down-to-earth tastes. He loves soccer — still plays the sport on weekends — and enjoys nothing more than watching Premier League team Arsenal. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children they strive to keep out of the public eye.

During the campaign he was stubbornly resistant to revealing flashes of personality, telling a Guardian interviewer that he couldn’t remember any of his dreams, did not have a favorite novel and had no childhood fears.

When he did get personal, telling a journalist that he hopes to carve out Friday evenings to spend with his family — his wife is Jewish, and Friday-night Shabbat dinners are a family tradition — the Conservatives used it against him, claiming Starmer planned to be a part-time prime minister.

Born in 1963, Starmer is the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who named him after Keir Hardie, the Labour Party’s first leader. One of four children, he was raised in a cash-strapped household in a small town outside London.

"There were hard times," he said in a speech launching his election campaign. "I know what out-of-control inflation feels like, how the rising cost of living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: 'Will he bring another bill we can’t afford?'"

Starmer’s mother suffered from a chronic illness, Still’s disease, that left her in pain, and Starmer has said that visiting her in the hospital and helping to care for her helped form his strong support for the state-funded National Health Service.

He was the first member of his family to go to college, studying law at Leeds University and Oxford. As a lawyer, he took civil liberties cases including that of the "McLibel Two," green activists sued by McDonald's for handing out leaflets saying the restaurant chain sold unhealthy food.

The cases often put him at odds with both Conservative and Labour governments, so his switch to become chief prosecutor in 2008 surprised some colleagues. But during five years in the job he gained a reputation as a tough and hard-working director of public prosecutions, a role that included prosecuting people charged with terrorism, organized crime and other serious offenses.

Starmer entered politics relatively late, in his 50s, and was elected to Parliament in 2015. He often disagreed with the party leader at the time, staunch socialist Jeremy Corbyn, at one point quitting the party’s top team over disagreements, but agreed to serve as Labour’s Brexit spokesman under Corbyn.

Starmer has faced repeated questions about that decision, and about urging voters to support Corbyn, a divisive figure under whose leadership the party was hammered in the 2019 election.

He said he wanted to stay and fight to change Labour, arguing that "leaders are temporary, but political parties are permanent."

After Corbyn led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019 — the latter the party’s worst result since 1935 — Labour picked Starmer to lead efforts to rebuild.

His leadership has coincided with a turbulent period that saw Britain suffer through the COVID-19 pandemic, leave the EU, absorb the economic shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and endure economic turmoil from Liz Truss’ turbulent 49-day term as prime minister in 2022.

Voters are weary from a cost-of-living crisis, a wave of public sector strikes and political turmoil that saw the Conservative Party dispatch two prime ministers within weeks in 2022 — Boris Johnson and Truss — before installing Sunak to try to steady the ship.

Starmer imposed discipline on a party with a well-earned reputation for internal division, ditched some of Corbyn’s socialist policies and apologized for antisemitism that an internal investigation concluded had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.

Starmer promised "a culture change in the Labour Party." His mantra is now "country before party."

Starmer has promised voters that a Labour government can ease Britain’s chronic housing crisis and repair its fraying public services, especially the creaking health service — but without imposing tax increases or deepening the public debt.

"While I don’t think anyone is particularly excited about Keir Starmer, I think he has done a good job of situating himself as the kind of competent grown up in the room who is going to be able to bring government back to where it belongs," said Lise Butler, senior lecturer in modern history at City University of London.

Starmer will face pressure to deliver quickly. He has already dismayed some supporters by watering down a pledge to spend billions investing in green technology, saying a Labour government would not borrow more to fund public spending.

Starmer was a strong opponent of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, but now says a Labour government won’t seek to reverse Brexit, another disappointment to many in the party.

"A lot of people on the left will accuse him of letting them down, betraying socialist principles. And a lot of people on the right accuse him of flip-flopping," said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.

"But, hey, if that’s what it takes to win, then I think that tells you something about Starmer’s character. He will do whatever it takes — and has done whatever it takes — to get into government."