The news out of Istanbul is horrific. It was meant to be so.
The international terminal there is a place that we know fairly well, and Istanbul is a city that we dearly love.
I’m told that tourism in Turkey has plummeted by roughly 45% over the past year, given the various recent attacks. And this, of course, will drive numbers down even further. Which is what it was meant to do.
The selection of, precisely, the airport’s international terminal was very deliberate. It will intimidate tourists, and they’ll be intimidated with good reason.
The same thing was true of the January bombing at the Obelisk of Theodosius (strictly, the Obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III) in the Sultanahmet district of the city, a very popular spot with tourists — of whom it killed thirteen (one from Peru and twelve from Germany). During a break in a conference there just six weeks earlier, my wife and I had taken a couple of fellow conference attendees with us to that very spot. We could easily have been victims of such a bomber.
The only comfort that I can take in this is that the government of Turkey will — must — take these attacks very seriously, and that the Turkish military are, from what I can tell, quite competent. I wish them well in bringing the monsters who perpetrate such attacks to justice and in ending this terror. To a serious degree, the future of Turkey and its economy rests on their effort.
We love Turkey, and we want others to see it and to come to love it. These attacks must be stopped.
Posted from Brockwood Hall, Cumbria, England
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