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.
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