Deadly Istanbul blast echoes past attacks in Turkiye

Turkiye blamed Kurdish militants for a blast that killed six people on a busy Istanbul shopping street on Sunday, and police detained a Syrian woman suspected of having planted the bomb among a sweep of 47 arrests, Reuters reports.

The blast, the first to hit Istanbul in a number of years, has reminded Turks of a wave of attacks carried out by various militant groups targeting Turkish cities between mid-2015 and early 2017.

Following are some of those deadly attacks:

5 January, 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.

31 December, 2016 – Daesh 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.

17 December, 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.

10 December, 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.

26 August, 2016 – A suicide truck bombing at a police headquarters in Turkiye’s largely Kurdish south-east killed at least 11 and wounded dozens. The PKK claimed responsibility for the attack.

READ: Turkiye to build 100,000 homes for Syrians in Idlib

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

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

12 May, 2016 – Explosives that detonated in a village in south-eastern Turkiye 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.

19 March, 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 Daesh militant group was responsible for the bombing.

13 March, 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.

17 February, 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.

12 January, 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 Daesh.

10 October, 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 Daesh, for life.

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

20 July, 2015 – A Daesh 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.

READ: Turkish Interior Minister announces the arrest of the Istanbul bomber