Blasts Shatter Turks' Security
Attacks Apparently Aimed at Jews Take Highest Toll on Their Muslim Allies
By Yesim Borg and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A19
ISTANBUL, Nov. 15 -- After Saturday morning's explosion at the Beth Israel synagogue in central Istanbul, the only sign of security guard Mehmet Ates was his cell phone.
"The police called and told us they found his mobile phone," said his sister, Zeynep Donmez, 18, whose eyes were puffy and red from crying as she sat outside a morgue with her sobbing mother.
"He's not anywhere. He has a one-year-old daughter," Donmez continued. "He has been married for two years. They took his life. He is 27."
Ates had been a guard for the past year at the synagogue in Sisli, a neighborhood of textile shops. Ates and another guard were missing and presumed dead after the explosion; a third guard was in critical condition and undergoing surgery. An Istanbul policeman has been identified as one of the 20 people who died in the blasts.
While the attacks appeared to be aimed at Turkey's Jewish community, it was the Muslims who protected the Jews who suffered some of the heaviest losses.
[ . . . ]
Hasan Ozsoy, 42, who had worked as a guard at the synagogue for nearly half of his life, brought his son, Hamza, 13, to work with him Saturday, according to his wife, Gunay. Her husband had planned to collect his salary and take his son out to buy new clothes for the feast of Eid-al Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Saturday afternoon Gunay, 42, sat in the Sisli Etal Hospital weeping as her husband and son were undergoing surgery for broken bones and hip and head injuries.
This WaPo article paints a vivid and tragic picture of Turkish Muslim families whose lives were senselessly ripped apart in an instant. But buried toward the end is another chilling observation.
Although the two car bombs positioned a few dozen blocks apart were detonated within a few minutes of each other between 9:15 and 9:20 a.m., the organizers of the attack were unable to maneuver their explosives-laden vehicles close enough to the Jewish temples to destroy them.
