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A man sits beside the coffin of his relative

who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Photograph: Jawad Jalali

EPA

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan at record high, UN warns

Monday 25 July 2016 08.23 BST

Last modified on Monday 25 July 2016 08.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/
civilian-casualties-in-afghanistan-at-record-high-un-warns

Ray Rivera (left), a DJ at Pulse nightclub, is consoled by a friend.

Photograph: Joe Burbank/AP

Orlando massacre: relatives and friends react to shooting

Sunday 12 June 2016 16.53 BST Last modified on Sunday 12 June 2016 17.35 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/12/orlando-nightclub-attack-relatives-friends-react-shooting

Terrorist Attack

at Nightclub in Istanbul

Kills Dozens

DEC. 31, 2016

The New York Times

By an EMPLOYEE

of THE NEW YORK TIMES

and CHRISTOPHER MELE

BURSA, Turkey — At least 39 people were killed and dozens more were wounded when a single gunman attacked a crowded Istanbul nightclub about an hour after midnight on New Year’s Day, Turkish officials said.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu called it an act of terrorism and said the gunman was still being sought early Sunday.

Sixteen of the people killed were foreigners, the Foreign Ministry said; it was not clear if any were Americans. At least 69 people were being treated at hospitals, Mr. Soylu said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the mass shooting, which came as threats against Turkey by the Islamic State and its supporters have increased. It was the fourth terrorist attack in Turkey in less than a month.

This one started about 1:15 a.m. at the Reina nightclub, which overlooks the Bosporus and is known for its celebrity clientele and is popular among foreigners. As many as 600 people were celebrating the New Year when a lone attacker, said to be armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, burst in, officials said.

Gov. Vasip Sahin of Istanbul Province said a police officer outside the club had been killed before the bloodshed began inside.

“One person first kills the police officer outside, and then a civilian,” Mr. Sahin said. “Inside, he rained bullets brutally, mercilessly over innocent people who were there just to celebrate the New Year and have fun.”

In the ensuing panic and the rush to escape, some clubgoers jumped into the Bosporus — which separates Europe and Asia — and others hunkered down for safety.

Sinem Uyanik, who was there with her husband, Lutfu Uyanik, told The Associated Press that she had seen several bodies inside the club. Her husband was wounded, she added, but not seriously.

“Before I could understand what was happening, my husband fell on top me,” she said. “I had to lift several bodies from on top of me before I could get out.”

A wounded man on a stretcher told the independent Turkish news agency DHA that the attacker had “put a bullet to the head of anyone alive.”

#BREAKING Attackers allegedly entered Istanbul's Reina night club in Santa costumes, opened fire randomly #Turkey pic.twitter.com/fApCLhdD7u
— CNN Türk ENG (@CNNTURK_ENG) Dec. 31, 2016

Ortaköy'de gece kulübüne silahlı saldırı https://t.co/e8tIZntZXQ pic.twitter.com/3Be8ToHpsC
— NTV (@ntv) Dec. 31, 2016

Television footage showed dozens of ambulances rushing to the scene and people fleeing, some walking with difficulty, arm in arm.

The owner of Reina, Mehmet Kocarslan, told the Hurriyet news site that security measures had been beefed up over the past 10 days after American intelligence officials had warned about an attack in Turkey over the holidays.

The shooting came just days after the Nashir Media Foundation, a group identified by experts as being pro-Islamic State, published the last of three messages calling on individual attackers in the West to turn the holiday season into days of “terror and blood.” It urged attacks on clubs, markets and movie theaters.

Nashir Media singled out Turkey in its threats. “Attack the embassies and consulates of Turkey and all coalition countries where you are,” the message said.

“Turn their happiness and joy into grieves,” it went on in garbled English, “and their feasts into funerals.”

In addition, there have been numerous official threats by the Islamic State, including from its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who in his most recent speech called for attacks against Turkey.

On Dec. 22, the United States government issued a statement that extremist groups were “continuing aggressive efforts to conduct attacks throughout Turkey” in areas where American citizens and expatriates lived or visited. The statement urged caution about being in crowded places and public gatherings during the holidays.

The Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, immediately cracked down on news coverage of the attack. He directed news outlets to await official government updates. He invoked a law that casts reporting on such attacks as supporting terrorists.

A White House official said President Obama had been briefed by his national security advisers about the nightclub attack. Mr. Obama expressed his condolences and offered assistance to the Turkish authorities.

Ned Price, a spokesman for the National Security Council, condemned the attack in a statement and said the savagery of the attack was underscored by how “innocent revelers” had been targeted.
Turkey

“We reaffirm the support of the United States for Turkey, our NATO ally, in our shared determination to confront and defeat all forms of terrorism,” he said.

Turkey is still recovering from a coup attempt that began on July 15 in which at least 265 people were killed.

Though the effort sputtered in a matter of hours, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded with a monthslong crackdown targeting dissidents across Turkish society. In addition to arresting thousands of military personnel suspected of involvement in the coup, hundreds of thousands of civil servants, educational workers and journalists have been suspended.

The coup and the assassination of Ambassador Andrey G. Karlov of Russia in Ankara on Dec. 19 raised concerns that the country’s security establishment has grown ineffective. The internal turmoil also raised doubts about how well Turkey would be able to participate in international counterterrorism efforts, especially against the Islamic State.

Since the crackdown began, protests against Mr. Erdogan have led to frequent clashes between demonstrators and the police. And reports of targeted attacks against civilians after martial law was declared in July have revived painful memories of the political violence Turkey experienced in the 1970s and 1980s.

Turkey’s struggles with security had already grown severe months before the coup attempt. A spate of suicide bombings and other attacks since 2015 was capped off by the June 28 attack on Istanbul Ataturk Airport, the country’s busiest. The attack left 45 people dead.

A Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for a double bombing that killed 39 people and wounded 154 outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul on Dec. 10. That death toll ultimately climbed to 45.

A car bombing in central Turkey killed 13 soldiers and wounded more than 50 other members of the military on Dec. 17. Two days later, Mr. Karlov was assassinated.

An employee of The New York Times reported from Bursa, Turkey, and Christopher Mele from New York. Zach Montague, Kenneth R. Rosen and Timothy R. Williams contributed reporting from New York, and Rukmini Callimachi from San Diego.

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2017,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Attackers Fire, Killing Dozens in Turkish Club.

Terrorist Attack at Nightclub in Istanbul Kills Dozens,
NYT,
DEC. 31, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/
world/europe/turkey-istanbul-attack.html

Hunt for Berlin Suspect

Ends in Gunfire on an Italian Plaza

DEC. 23, 2016

The New York Times

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO,

GAIA PIANIGIANI

and RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

SESTO SAN GIOVANNI, Italy — It was a routine identity check, the kind Italy has relied on to stem the flow of illegal migration deeper into Europe. But the man stopped by two police officers around 3 a.m. Friday outside the northern city of Milan was anything but an ordinary drifter.

He turned out to be perhaps Europe’s most wanted man, Anis Amri, the chief suspect in the deadly terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people. Asked to show his papers and empty his backpack, he pulled out a gun, shot one officer, and in turn was shot and killed by another.

“Police bastards,” Mr. Amri, who turned 24 this week, shouted in Italian before dying, according to the account given by Antonio De Iesu, director of the Milan police, at a news conference.

For Italy, the shooting death of Mr. Amri, a Tunisian who had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State’s supreme leader in a video released by the group on Friday, spurred a moment of national pride and some reassurance that its security measures were working.

For Germany, it brought a sense of palpable relief after a week of national anguish. “Now I can wish you all a really peaceful Christmas,” the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, told reporters Friday afternoon, as he thanked his Italian counterparts.

But the death also raised numerous questions about Mr. Amri’s movements and motivations, as well as about the potential gaps in the security of a Europe with open borders.

Law enforcement authorities issued a Europe-wide warrant on Wednesday for Mr. Amri, who migrated to Italy in 2011 and was imprisoned for four years in six different prisons in Sicily before making his way to Germany in 2015.

Italy officially classified Mr. Amri as a terrorism risk after he threatened to decapitate a Christian cellmate in prison in Palermo in 2014, according to Lorenzo Vidino, who chairs an Italian commission of experts on radicalization that was formed this fall.

“He was basically a troublemaker, very aggressive and very violent. And then from there, he starts a whole trajectory,” said Mr. Vidino, who said that the Tunisian migrant was arrested soon after his arrival by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011, after back-to-back arson episodes. “He establishes a track record of bad behavior, which at the beginning was just aggressive and threatening and disrespectful. But in the last place, where he was held in a high-security prison in Palermo, he showed signs of radicalism.”

The threat to his cellmate was considered serious enough that officials added him to Italy’s database of radicalized individuals, a list that includes only a few hundred names, said Mr. Vidino, who is also the director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

Both Italy and Germany tried to deport him to Tunisia but were thwarted by a lack of documents and cooperation from his home country.

Even after Mr. Amri was named as the prime suspect in the attack in Berlin, he was able to roam freely around Europe, his face plastered across the news media and a reward of more than $100,000 on his head.

“This mobility is great for the law-abiding and equally great for the non-law-abiding,” said Douglas H. Wise, a former senior C.I.A. officer, of the borderless travel within the European Union.

What Mr. Amri did in the four days between the attack in Berlin and when he was ultimately killed in Sesto San Giovanni, a suburb north of central Milan, is not clear, but that is now the subject of an intense investigation that the authorities remain reluctant to discuss.

Asked on Friday when exactly the authorities began to view Mr. Amri as a suspect, the head of Germany’s federal criminal police, Holger Münch, restated in general terms that it was on Tuesday, after investigators found an identity document in a wallet in the cab of the tractor-trailer used in the attack.

The police have not said why the wallet was not discovered on Monday, when the attack occurred and a murdered driver was found in the cab. On Friday, Mr. Münch for the first time mentioned that an alias was involved, but he said the police had quickly linked it to Mr. Amri.

In Italy, Mr. Vidino said that a train ticket found on Mr. Amri’s body showed that he had traveled by train to Turin in Italy from the French town of Chambéry, near the border between the two nations. But there is no trail suggesting how he got from Berlin to Chambéry.

A senior European counterterrorism official said that the delay in identifying Mr. Amri probably gave him a crucial head start of several hours to flee Germany, and that he would have been able to buy a train ticket to France and Italy without showing identification papers.

Facial-recognition software on surveillance cameras in Europe is still in rudimentary form in most places, the official said, so even after Mr. Amri was identified, he could have slipped through the train stations undetected, especially if he was wearing a hat or hood.

Mr. Amri’s ability to hide through the week and make his way from Germany, through France, to Italy also raised questions of whether he had the help of a broader network, particularly one possibly linked to the Islamic State.

The group called Mr. Amri “a soldier” in the video released on Friday, in which Mr. Amri proclaimed loyalty to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and declared that the attack in Berlin was intended to avenge coalition airstrikes in Syria that have killed civilians.

The video was evidently filmed in the Moabit district of northern Berlin, on the Kieler bridge. The autumn foliage seen on trees suggested it was filmed in fall or even early December.

In Germany, Mr. Amri came on the radar of the authorities in part for suspected ties to a 32-year-old Iraqi-born Salafist preacher who went by the name Abu Walaa and who was jailed just weeks ago on suspicion of recruiting fighters to join the Islamic State.

“There is high suspicion that he was behind the departure of a number of Germans to Syria — as many as two dozen — but the intelligence is not clear as to his exact role, whether in radicalization, recruitment or terror financing,” said Laith Alkhouri, a director at Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence company in New York that tracks militant and cyber threats.

In a telephone call from the suspect’s hometown in Tunisia, Mr. Amri’s older brother, Walid, said that the family wondered whether he became radicalized while in jail in Italy. After his brother was released, he informed the family that he was leaving for Germany “with friends he had made in jail,” Walid Amri said.

Also unknown is whether Mr. Amri had any accomplices in the Berlin attack — a question that Peter Frank, Germany’s top federal prosecutor, identified as a priority for investigators.

“It is very important now to determine if there was a network of cooperators, a network of supporters, accessories or assistants helping him to prepare the attack, execute the attack and also to escape,” he said at a news conference on Friday in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The only uncertainty that seemed to be settled on Friday was that the man killed was indeed Mr. Amri.

“There is absolutely no doubt that the person who was killed was Anis Amri, the suspect in the terrorist attack in Berlin,” the Italian interior minister, Marco Minniti, said at a news conference.

“As soon as this person entered our country, he was the most wanted man in Europe, and we immediately identified him and neutralized him,” Mr. Minniti said. “This means that our security is working really well.”

Some analysts, however, said that Mr. Amri’s flight over the past 72 hours from German to Italy through France underscored Europe’s porous border controls. “Terrorists with multiple false identification documents are able to exploit Europe’s open borders. Just as Amri arrived in Europe and moved almost seamlessly around the continent before the Berlin attack, he was able to do the same after it,” said Seth G. Jones, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation.

Mr. Amri traveled from Turin to Central Station in Milan, where he arrived around 1 a.m. Friday. Surveillance cameras in the Milan train station recorded Mr. Amri’s movements, Italian investigators said. It was not clear how Mr. Amri made his way to Sesto San Giovanni, about four miles away.

“How he traveled there and what he was doing there are subject to delicate investigations,” Mr. De Iesu, of the Milan police, said at the news conference. “We have to understand whether he was in transit or was awaiting someone.”

Sesto San Giovanni is a “a strategic hub for transportation,” the town’s deputy mayor, Andrea Rivolta, said in an interview at city hall. “Sesto is a junction for the railway system, the Milan metro, municipal buses and buses that reach all of Europe,” as well as southern Italy.

According to the account provided by Mr. De Iesu, Mr. Amri was standing alone on a piazza in Sesto San Giovanni, next to the northern terminus of a subway line.

When the officers stopped him and asked for identification, he responded, in good Italian with a North African accent, that he was not carrying any documents on him. They asked him to empty his pockets and backpack. He was carrying a small knife and the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, but no cellphone.

But then he pulled out a pistol, Mr. De Iesu said.

“It was a regular patrol, under the new system of intensified police checks on the territory,” he said. “They had no perception that it could be him, otherwise they’d have been more careful.”

The officer whom Mr. Amri shot, identified as Cristian Movio, was wounded in the shoulder and had surgery on Friday. The other officer, who shot Mr. Amri, was identified as Luca Scatà.

Follow Elisabetta Povoledo @EPovoledo, Gaia Pianigiani @gaia_pianigiani, and Rukmini Callimachi @rcallimachi on Twitter.

Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Sesto San Giovanni, Gaia Pianigiani from Rome and Rukmini Callimachi from New York. Reporting was contributed by Franziska Reymann and Alison Smale from Berlin, Sewell Chan from London, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Lorenzo Tondo from Palermo, Italy.

A version of this article appears in print on December 24, 2016, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Berlin Manhunt Ends in Gunfire in Italian Plaza.

Hunt for Berlin Suspect Ends in Gunfire on an Italian Plaza,
NYT, DEC. 23, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/
world/europe/berlin-anis-amri-killed-milan.html

Bombing in Turkey

Kills 13 Soldiers

and Wounds Dozens More

DEC. 17, 2016

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A car bombing in central Turkey killed 13 soldiers and wounded more than 50 other members of the military on Saturday, the latest in a series of attacks in the country.

The attack, in the city of Kayseri, targeted a bus carrying soldiers on weekend leave, the Turkish Army said in a statement. Health Minister Recep Akdag said 56 people had been wounded in the attack, including four who were in critical condition, according to The Associated Press. The Turkish military said 48 members of the armed forces were among the wounded.

Video footage showed a bus in flames near a university campus as people tried to extinguish the fire. A wrecked car was nearby.

“I saw the explosion,” the Ihlas News Agency quoted a witness as saying. “The engine of the bus was flung. The bodies of people who died in the bus were flung, too.”

No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K.

“The form and targets of the acts reveal with clarity that the real aim of the separatist organization is to stand in the way of Turkey, trip it, make it focus its power and energy elsewhere,” Mr. Erdogan said in a written statement, referring to the P.K.K.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said that Turkish authorities had identified the Kayseri attacker and that seven people had been taken into custody in connection with the attack, according to The A.P. The police said they were searching for five other suspects.

Turkey has been hit by frequent bomb attacks, the latest one a week ago. A double bombing in central Istanbul killed 44 people and wounded more than 150. The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a Kurdish militant group considered an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, claimed responsibility.

Turkey is also wary of Kurdish factions that have been fighting against Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq.

“We know that these attacks we have endured are not unrelated to happenings in Syria and Iraq, or even our economical fluctuations,” Mr. Erdogan said, according to The A.P.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2016, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: 13 Soldiers Die in Bus Attack in Turkey.

Bombing in Turkey Kills 13 Soldiers and Wounds Dozens More,
NYT, DEC. 17, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/
world/europe/turkey-bombing-kayseri.html

Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo

Kills Dozens

DEC. 11, 2016

The New York Times

By DECLAN WALSH

and NOUR YOUSSEF

CAIRO — A bomb ripped through a section reserved for women at Cairo’s main Coptic cathedral during Sunday morning Mass, killing at least 25 people and wounding 49, mostly women and children, Egyptian state media said.

The attack was the deadliest against Egypt’s Christian minority in years. Video from the blast site circulating on social media showed blood-smeared floors and shattered pews among the marble pillars at St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, the seat of Egypt’s Orthodox Christian Church, where the blast occurred in a chapel adjacent to the main building.

As security officials arrived to secure the site, angry churchgoers gathered outside and hurled insults, accusing them of negligence.

“There was no security at the gate,” one woman told reporters. “They were all having breakfast inside their van.”

A man asked, “You’re coming now after everything was destroyed?”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, although the attack bore the hallmark of Islamist militants fighting President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who have previously targeted minority Christians over their perceived support for his government.

It was the second major attack in the Egyptian capital in three days, marking a jarring return to violence after months of relative calm. An Islamist militant group claimed responsibility for an explosion at a security check post on Friday that killed six police officers.

Mr. Sisi’s strongman rule has come under economic pressure in recent months amid high inflation and a sharp drop in the value of the Egyptian pound. Threatened street protests last month did not materialize, but the surging attacks may be an attempt to stoke opposition through violence.

Egyptian security officials, quoted by state media, said that an explosive device containing about 26 pounds of TNT had been placed in the chapel. It went off during Mass around 10 a.m.

Most of the dead and wounded were women and children, Sherief Wadee, an assistant minister for health, said in a television interview. Mr. Sisi declared three days of mourning, state media said.

Hours later, hundreds of angry worshipers gathered at the church gates to register their anger. “We either avenge them or die like them,” they chanted. Tarek Attiya, a police spokesman, denied accusations of lax security at the church, and said the police had been operating a metal detector at the church entrance as normal.

A current of fury and frustration ran through the crowd gathered at the church gates, much of it directed at Mr. Sisi and his supporters and expressed in unusually strong terms.

At one point the crowd broke into chants of “the people demand the downfall of the regime,” the signature call of the mass uprising in 2011 that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

The crowd pushed out three prominent television presenters seen as sympathetic to Mr. Sisi — chanting, “Leave! Leave!” — and called for the resignation of the interior minister, Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar.

Many Egyptians reported that TV stations broadcasting pictures of the crowd had cut out audio feeds that carried the antigovernment chants.

Such public anger toward the government has become rare under Mr. Sisi, who has imprisoned thousands of opposition figures, cracked down on civil society and demonstrated little tolerance for the mildest street protests.

The blast coincided with a national holiday marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. Shrapnel pockmarked religious icons and stone walls inside the church, where witnesses gave graphic accounts of bloodied bodies strewn across the broken pews.

Hundreds of people streamed into nearby hospitals, frantically seeking news of the wounded. Officials said at least six children were among the dead.

Egypt’s beleaguered Coptic minority, which makes up about one-tenth of the country’s roughly 90 million people, has been discriminated against for decades, and has come under violent attack since the uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak.

The leadership of the Coptic Church, under Pope Tawadros II, has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Sisi, who came to power in 2013. But that support has also made Copts a target for elements of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists attacked hundreds of Coptic churches and homes in 2013, in a backlash after the security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators in central Cairo in August of that year.

The violence smacks of sectarian prejudice because Mr. Sisi’s support stems from Egypt’s Muslim majority. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are highest in Minya, the province in upper Egypt that saw the worst attacks on Copts in 2013.

Coptic officials in Minya have counted at least 37 attacks in the past three years, including episodes of houses set on fire and Copts being assaulted on the streets.

“Once again the lives of Egypt’s Christian minority are dispensed with as objects within Egypt’s violent and cynical battle over power,” said Timothy E. Kaldas, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

After the blast on Sunday, dozens of anguished Christians, some wearing black, waited for news of the wounded and the dead outside El Demerdash Hospital.

Noureen Grace, her face streaked with tears, waited for the remains of her sister-in-law, Madeline Michelle. “She was completely destroyed,” Ms. Grace said, describing the trauma of witnessing the mutilated body. “I spoke to her only yesterday. We spoke every day.”

Moments later a red-faced woman, still heaving with grief, walked past. “They are all dead,” she said, declining to give her name. “They were all my friends.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 12, 2016, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo Kills at Least 25.

Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo Kills Dozens,
NYT, DEC 11, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/
world/middleeast/cairo-coptic-cathedral-attack.html

Kurdish Militant Group

Claims Responsibility

for Deadly Istanbul Bombing

DEC. 11, 2016

The New York Times

By SAFAK TIMUR

ISTANBUL — A Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility on Sunday for a double bombing that killed 39 people and wounded 154 outside a soccer stadium in the heart of Istanbul the night before.

The group — Kurdistan Freedom Falcons — said in a statement that two of its members had carried out the suicide attacks in retaliation for state violence in the predominantly Kurdish region in southeast Turkey. The group also cited the continuing imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state.

The Kurdish Freedom Falcons, which claimed responsibility in June for a car bombing in Istanbul that killed at least 11 people, is considered an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had blamed the P.K.K. for the twin bombings on Saturday night.

Turkish officials said the two suicide attacks were carried out near the Vodafone Arena stadium. One of them involved the detonation of nearly 1,000 pounds of explosives in a vehicle, and the other was carried out by a suicide bomber who targeted police officers after a soccer game.

At least 30 police officers, eight civilians and one unidentified person were killed in the attacks, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said during a funeral for one of the victims on Sunday.

The government declared a national day of mourning on Sunday, and top Turkish officials, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, attended funeral services held at Istanbul’s Police Headquarters.

“They should know that they would not get away with this; they will pay heavier prices,” Mr. Erdogan said after visiting the wounded at an Istanbul hospital. “They attacked vilely, perfidiously at two spots against those young lions, who were preparing to get on their buses.”

So far, the authorities have detained 13 people in connection with the attacks, the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said.

Violence has surged in southeastern Turkey and spilled over to western cities since the government started a counterinsurgency campaign against the P.K.K. after the group ended a two-year cease-fire in July 2015.

Turkey has been hit by a string of terrorist attacks this year that officials have attributed to Kurdish militants and the Islamic State. And the government’s crackdown and consolidation of power after an attempted coup over the summer have further set the country on edge.

On Sunday, video footage published by the local news media appeared to show one of the suicide bombers in the attacks on Saturday walking along a road when several police officers stopped him just before he detonated his explosives.

“All terror organizations are attacking our nation and our people for the same goal,” Mr. Erdogan said in a statement after the attacks. “Whenever Turkey takes a positive step with regards to its future, a response comes immediately before us in the form of blood, lives, savagery and chaos at the hands of terrorist organizations.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 12, 2016, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Kurdish Militant Group Says It Carried Out Deadly Bombings
in Istanbul.

Kurdish Militant Group Claims Responsibility for Deadly Istanbul Bombing,
NYT, DEC. 11, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/world/europe/
kurdish-tak-istanbul-double-bombing.html

In Istanbul, 38 Killed in 2 Blasts

Possibly Targeting Police Officers

DEC. 10, 2016

The New York Times

By TIM ARANGO

ISTANBUL — Thirty-eight people were killed and 136 were wounded here on Saturday in two explosions, and officials said one of them was a car bomb outside a stadium that targeted police officers on duty for a soccer game.

Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, speaking from Ankara in comments carried by local media, said the second explosion appeared to be in a nearby park, and may have been a suicide bomb.

The explosions set off activity around central Istanbul, with rushing ambulances, helicopters hovering, and a large plume of smoke rising over the city, scenes that were as familiar as they were frantic. Like last summer’s attempted coup and a devastating attack at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, the bombs on Saturday came in the late evening, when this megacity’s streets, bars and restaurants were packed.

Shortly after the bombings, Mr. Soylu said that 20 police officers had been wounded. Turkish media later reported that more than a dozen police officers had been killed. Updated casualty numbers were later reported by The Associated Press.

Once the news ricocheted around town, revelers hurried home, glued to their mobile phones, amid the sound of sirens. Those closer to the stadium heard screams and the sounds of gunfire.

“I heard a large explosion and immediately turned around and then there was a second explosion,” said Sheri Cavazos, an Istanbul resident who was at a nearby hotel. “I immediately thought it was a terrorist attack. I wasn’t surprised. I was expecting it.”

Images shared on social media showed fires, several cars destroyed and police hats scattered on the ground.

But within a couple of hours it seemed clear that a major attack against civilians had not transpired. The bombings occurred after the game was over and most fans had left the area around the stadium. Local media reported that the attack targeted a riot police bus, not a gathering of civilians.

Turkey faces numerous security threats, including the Islamic State, which Turkey is fighting in Syria and Iraq as part of an American-led coalition against the terrorist group, and Kurdish militants who are at war with the Turkish state in the southeast. No group immediately took credit for the attack, although the choice of target — the police, rather than civilians — was in line with the types of attacks that have been carried out by Kurdish militants.

Over the last four years, Turkey has evolved from a country of stability and prosperity that was trying to lead the Middle East at a time of great turmoil to one that is increasingly consumed by violence and political problems within its own borders.

Istanbul, a city of 14 million residents that has thrummed with tourists in recent years, has become a frequent target, with attacks over the last year in the old city and on Istiklal Avenue, the most famous street. Tourism has collapsed, businesses have fled the city center to go to the suburbs, and many trendy restaurants and shops have closed.

“This is the new norm now,” said Ozan Tas, a taxi driver who was working near the stadium.

Ceylan Yeginsu and Safak Timur contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2016, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Two Blasts in Istanbul Leave 29 Dead and 166 Injured.

In Istanbul, 38 Killed in 2 Blasts Possibly Targeting Police Officers,
NYT, DEC. 10, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/world/europe/istanbul-
is-rocked-by-2-explosions-possibly-targeting-police-officers.html

Pakistan Reels

After Attack on Police Training College

Leaves 61 Dead

OCT. 25, 2016

The New York Times

By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan was reeling on Tuesday from a major terrorist attack: an overnight assault on a police training college in the southwest that officials said had killed at least 61 people, most of them cadets.

The attack, carried out by three militants wielding guns and explosives, also wounded 120 people at the college near Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, a restive province.

The militants struck late Monday and battled security forces for several hours before they were killed. Two detonated suicide vests, and the third was shot, said Mir Sarfraz Bugti, a provincial minister.

The Amaq news agency, which acts as a news service for the Islamic State, posted a picture of three men holding guns and wearing ammunition vests who it said were the attackers. The Islamic State had also claimed responsibility for the last major attack in the Quetta area, an August suicide bombing at a hospital in the city that killed dozens of lawyers.

Pakistani officials, however, earlier blamed Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned militant group affiliated with the Taliban, for the assault on the police college. After the Islamic State claimed responsibility, a senior security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media, said the Islamic State had “outsourced” the attack to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

The assault showed that extremist groups remain a serious threat for the Pakistani military and security forces, which have claimed great success against militants in recent years. Security forces were put on high alert across Pakistan on Tuesday, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, said they would visit Quetta.

Baluchistan is home to a decades-old separatist insurgency, and Taliban militants maintain a presence in Quetta and many other parts of the province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran. Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Baluchistan government, blamed Afghanistan for the attack on the police college.

“All such attacks have been managed from across the border in Afghanistan,” Mr. Kakar said. “Hostile intelligence agencies of neighboring countries are directly responsible for terrorism in Pakistan.”

Mr. Kakar said that toll could rise because some of the injuries were severe. “We are investigating the failure of law enforcement agencies,” he said.

Baluchistan’s chief minister, Nawab Sanaullah Zehri, said intelligence reports days earlier had indicated that an attack on Quetta was imminent. He suggested that security preparations in the city itself had led the militants to target the college, which is about nine miles from the capital.

“Security was already on high alert, and maybe that is why they have targeted the police training center on the outskirts of the city,” Mr. Zehri said.

One of the wounded cadets, Qasim Ali, said the attack began late Monday as the cadets were getting ready for bed. “Suddenly we heard gunshots,” he said by telephone from a hospital.

“We ran toward the hall door to close it,” Mr. Ali said. “I was wounded in my chest and left leg when the attacker threw an explosive device inside the hall.” He said he took cover under a bed and lost consciousness.

“I wish we’d had enough guns,” Mr. Ali said. “The terrorists could have been killed easily before they could kill us.”

Follow Salman Masood on Twitter @salmanmasood.

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 26, 2016, on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Pakistan Reels as Attack on Police College Leaves 61 Dead.

Pakistan Reels After Attack on Police Training College Leaves 61 Dead,
NYT, Oct. 25, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/
world/asia/quetta-attack-isis-pakistan.html

Ahmad Khan Rahami

Is Arrested in Manhattan

and New Jersey Bombings

SEPT. 19, 2016

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA,

WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM,

AL BAKER and ADAM GOLDMAN

The man who the police said sowed terror across two states, setting off bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore and touching off a furious manhunt, was tracked down on Monday morning sleeping in the dank doorway of a neighborhood bar and taken into custody after being wounded in a gun battle with officers.

The frenzied end came on a rain-soaked street in Linden, N.J., four hours after the police issued an unprecedented cellphone alert to millions of people in the area telling them to be on the lookout for Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28, who was described as “armed and dangerous.”

Even as the remarkably swift arrest eased fears across the region, investigators were still in the earliest stages of trying to determine what provoked the attacks, why a street in Chelsea was one of the targets and whether the bomber was aided by others. While investigators have been focused on Mr. Rahami’s actions immediately before and after the bombings, they were also working on Monday to trace his activities and travel in both recent months and years.

One law enforcement official said that the bomb technicians involved in the investigation believed that Mr. Rahami constructed all the devices and that his handiwork raised the possibility that he had received training from someone with experience building improvised explosive devices.

“If you’re working off the premise that the guy made all these devices,” the official said, “then the guy is a pretty good bombmaker. And you don’t get that good on the internet.”

It could not be determined on Monday whether Mr. Rahami had a lawyer, and his father did not respond to questions from reporters waiting outside the family’s apartment.

Mr. Rahami and his family had traveled periodically to Pakistan, and on one trip, he stayed for nearly a year. A senior law enforcement official said that no evidence had yet been uncovered that he had received military training abroad.

The senior law enforcement official said agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation were examining Mr. Rahami’s electronic devices as part of an effort to determine if he was inspired or directed by the Islamic State or any other terrorist organization.

Assistant Director William F. Sweeney, who heads the F.B.I.’s New York office, said investigators had not found any indication that there is a terrorist cell operating in the area or in the city, he said.

The arrest was the culmination of a sweeping, connect-the-dots manhunt that grew in urgency as the police and F.B.I. agents pieced together clues gleaned from both high-tech investigative tools and practiced detective work.

The weekend began with what seemed like an odd and troubling event, but one that hardly aroused widespread alarm.

At 9:30 a.m., three pipe bombs tied together blew apart a trash can just before the scheduled start of a Marine Corps run called Seaside Semper Five in Seaside Park, N.J.

Only one of the three bombs had detonated and no one was injured. The F.B.I. was brought in to investigate, but there was no indication about what would unfold 11 hours later.

Investigators believe that Mr. Rahami drove a car registered to his father into New York City shortly before the Chelsea blast erupted at 8:30 p.m.

In a review of surveillance video, the police later saw him near West 23rd Street and Avenue of the Americas wearing a backpack investigators believe contained one pressure cooker bomb. He was pulling a patterned duffle-type rolling bag that they believe contained another pressure cooker bomb and wearing a fanny pack on his left hip.

A short time later, a powerful explosion sent debris flying and shattered windows up and down the block. The bomb, filled with shrapnel and placed under a Dumpster on the busy crosstown thoroughfare, injured 29 people.

City streets were soon locked down and a tip to 911 led the police to a second device, the other pressure cooker bomb with a cellphone attached, four blocks to the north. Surveillance video collected by investigators would later show Mr. Rahami on West 27th Street, without his backpack but pulling the patterned bag and leaving it beside a mailbox.

But it would take hours to gather and analyze all of that video and zero in on Mr. Rahami as the man who left the bag behind.

All officials knew on Saturday night was that someone had deliberately placed bombs on a city street. Mayor Bill de Blasio was hesitant to call it an act of terrorism, and officials cautioned against linking the attack to the explosion in New Jersey.

The unexploded bomb found on West 27th Street, however, held critical clues. Once the police were able to remove it and examine it, they discovered a fingerprint that matched one in an arrest record for Mr. Rahami.

They also found similarities between the New York and New Jersey bombs, leading them to reverse their conclusion that they were not linked.

Most or all used old-style flip phones — an LG and a Samsung on the two Manhattan devices and an LG in Seaside Park — as timers, with Christmas-tree-style lights as initiators, the officials said. They said HMTD, an explosive compound, served as the detonator and a compound similar to a commercial explosive known as Tannerite served as the main charge in some devices.

Roughly 20 minutes after Mr. Rahami left the bag on West 27th Street, two men happened upon on the luggage, apparently unaware of its explosive contents. One of the men opened the bag, pulled out the bomb, which was inside a white plastic bag, and then left with the luggage. The authorities, who are eager to talk to the men, said that their handling of the device may have disabled it.

By Sunday, the authorities were monitoring addresses associated with Mr. Rahami. Increasingly confident that he was involved with the bombings, they made the decision to act when they saw a vehicle leaving one of those addresses.

The car was pulled over on the Belt Parkway near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn. Five people inside, some of them Mr. Rahami’s relatives, were questioned and later released.

Later on Sunday night, the police received a report of a suspicious package near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J.

The F.B.I., which responded, deployed a pair of robots to examine the bag and determined that it held five bombs, some of which were pipe bombs.

Around 12:30 a.m., the robots tried to clip a wire to disarm one bomb and accidentally detonated it. No one was injured.

The location of the bag was not far from where the Rahami family ran a restaurant, and before dawn on Monday, federal agents and local police officers were swarming a neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings and small businesses.

They searched the restaurant, First American Fried Chicken, and addresses where Mr. Rahami was reported to have spent time.

It was 3:05 a.m. Anthony Rodriguez, who lives across the street from the restaurant, heard an officer yell: “Come down! Come down!”

The police stormed up the stairs that led to the two apartments above the restaurant. They brought down of the suspect’s brothers. Officers questioned them.

Officers also brought down a woman who looked about 30, draped in colorful shawls that did not cover her head, and a girl wearing pajamas. They were locked inside a squad car.

The suspect’s father came down about 20 minutes later, handcuffed and wearing only shorts.

As investigators realized that all of the attacks were linked and that the bombs reflected a certain level of sophistication, they worried that the bomber would grow desperate and do something even more drastic.

They decided to take the unprecedented measure of using New York City’s emergency notification system — typically for major weather events — to alert people in the region that a dangerous suspect was on the loose. Shortly after 7 a.m., millions of people in the region received the notification to be on the lookout for Mr. Rahami.

Even as the police scoured the area near the restaurant, Mr. Rahami was seeking shelter from the morning rain under a doorway of a bar, Merdie’s Tavern in Linden, which is next to Elizabeth, trying to catch some sleep.

Around 10:30 a.m. the owner of the bar spotted a man sleeping in the doorway, officials said.

Capt. James Sarnicki of the Linden Police Department told reporters that an officer approached the man, later identified as Mr. Rahami, and when he woke him, he saw that he had a beard resembling that of the man on the wanted poster.

The officer ordered him to show his hands, Captain Sarnicki said, but instead, he pulled out a handgun, shooting an officer in the abdomen; the bullet struck his vest.

“The officer returned fire,” he said. Mr. Rahami fled, “indiscriminately firing his weapon at passing vehicles.”

Other officers joined the chase, and Mr. Rahami was shot multiple times. At least one other officer was wounded during the confrontation.

Shortly after 11 a.m., Mr. Rahami was in custody, splayed out beside the street, hands cuffed behind his back and his shirt rolled up, officers standing over him with their weapons drawn.

Mr. Rahami, blood pouring from a wound in his shoulder and splattered on his face, was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to University Hospital in Newark.

Diego Jeronimo, 36, the owner of a store near where the gun battle unfolded, said he opened his front door and saw a police car parked lengthwise across the street, an officer with his back to him with his gun drawn using the car as a shield. He heard around five shots.

“Then it calmed down a little bit, then we hear seven shots, but they were more distant,” he said.

Shawn Styles, 30, who works at Linden Auto Body next door, said he saw numerous police vehicles whiz down the avenue.

“Then multiple, multiple shots,” he said.

By sundown, Mr. Rahami had been charged with seven counts, including five counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, with bail set at $5.2 million. Mark Spivey, a spokesman for the Union County prosecutor’s office, said he did not know if Mr. Rahami had legal representation.

Correction: September 19, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of bombings on Saturday night. One bombing happened Saturday morning, in Seaside Park, N.J., and one happened Saturday night, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan; two blasts did not occur Saturday night. The error was repeated in the breaking news email that was sent to readers.

Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, Elizabeth A. Harris, Noah Remnick and Nate Schweber.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bombing Suspect Shot and Caught After a Manhunt.

Ahmad Khan Rahami Is Arrested in Manhattan and New Jersey Bombings,
NYT, September 19, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/nyregion/
nyc-nj-explosions-ahmad-khan-rahami.html

A Stark Reminder

of Guantánamo’s Sins

AUG. 25, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

It is haunting, maddening even, to revisit the facts of Abu Zubaydah’s time in American custody more than 14 years after he was detained in Pakistan in the frenzied period following the Sept. 11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner known to have been waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, loomed large in America’s imagination for years as the personification of evil.

On Tuesday, a small group of human rights advocates and journalists got a fleeting glimpse of Abu Zubaydah — the first since his detention — when he appeared before a panel of government officials to argue that he would not be a threat to the United States if he were released from the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. The hearing, which civilians were allowed to watch part of from a live video feed, is an opportunity to reflect on the shameful tactics employed during years of national panic about terrorism and to reinvigorate efforts to close the prison.

George W. Bush’s administration believed that Abu Zubaydah, a bearded Saudi who wears a patch on his left eye, was the operations head of Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush singled him out in a 2006 speech, calling him a “senior terrorist leader,” and claiming that “the security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.” Abu Zubaydah and men like him, government officials argued, fully justified the facility at Guantánamo as well as a secret web of prisons run by the C.I.A. They also justified the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” otherwise known as torture, then eagerly embraced by some American intelligence officials.

Years later, it became clear that Abu Zubaydah wasn’t a top figure in Al Qaeda after all. It also became clear that he had willingly provided insights into terrorist groups when he was interrogated by F.B.I. agents, who treated him cordially. By the time he was turned over to the C.I.A., his knowledge about threats to the United States appears to have been largely exhausted. Yet agency personnel insisted on the need for torture, waterboarding him at least 83 times and subjecting him to other cruelty.

Never charged and never tried, Abu Zubaydah has also never been allowed to speak publicly about his ordeal. His American abusers have never been held to account.

In a statement a government official read on his behalf during Tuesday’s hearing, Abu Zubaydah was quoted as having said that he “has no desire or intent to harm the United States or any other country.” The detainee, of Palestinian ancestry, was said to aspire to reunite with his family and start a small business. A one-page “detainee profile” released by the military said he “probably retains an extremist mind-set.” But he was described as highly cooperative with the prison staff, and the incriminating information listed on that document is a far cry from the erroneous assessment that was used as a justification for abuse.

President Obama is likely to leave office having failed to close Guantánamo, which he promised to do when he ran for office in 2008, calling it an insult to the Constitution and American values. He has, however, made significant headway in winnowing down the detainee population. Only 61 of the 780 men who have been detained in Guantánamo remain.

The two people seeking Mr. Obama’s job have staked out opposite positions on Guantánamo. Donald Trump has vowed to keep the prison open, expand it and “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Hillary Clinton has rightly concluded that “over the years, Guantánamo has inspired more terrorists than it has imprisoned.” That outcome could well have been avoided if men like Abu Zubaydah hadn’t been tortured, and if they had been given a chance to contest their detention in a court of law.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook
and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 25, 2016, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:
Stark Reminder of Guantánamo’s Sins.

A Stark Reminder of Guantánamo’s Sins,
NYT, AUG. 25, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/
opinion/a-stark-reminder-of-guantanamos-sins.html

Suicide Bomber

Kills Dozens at Pakistani Hospital

in Quetta

AUG. 8, 2016

The New York Times

By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bomber struck a hospital in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Monday, officials said, killing at least 74 people in another devastating attack on civilians in a city that has become a byword for massacre and struggle over the past decade.

Before the bomber attacked, dozens of lawyers had gathered at the hospital to condemn the shooting death hours earlier of a prominent colleague, officials said. They feared that the death toll from the bombing would rise, given the vast crowd of people seriously wounded in the attack.

Late on Monday evening, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the shooting and the bombing. “Our attacks will continue till the imposition of the Islamic system in the country,” the statement of responsibility read.

The bombing was also claimed by the regional branch of the Islamic State, according to the Amaq news agency, which is affiliated with the militant group. If confirmed, that would be a first attack by the group in Pakistan — though the claim may be related to the fact that in the past, the Jamaat-ul Ahrar splinter group has expressed support for the Islamic State.

Even as militant attacks have been down sharply across Pakistan as a whole in the past two years, Baluchistan Province, where Quetta is the main city, remains violent.

For more than a decade, Baluchistan, a rugged and resource-rich province bordering Afghanistan and Iran, has been wracked by a separatist war, ethnic and sectarian violence and militant intrigue. Those fault lines come to a point in Quetta, a city of more than one million.

Quetta’s Hazara minority, which is mostly Shiite, has been targeted repeatedly by Sunni extremist groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Political tensions between ethnic Pashtun and Baluch leaders have been another source of conflict. Additionally, the Afghan Taliban’s leadership is based in Quetta, and infighting, militant-driven assassinations and kidnappings have scarred the city.

At the same time, Baluchistan is one of the most forbidding environments for journalists. Foreign reporters are routinely barred from visiting, and many local journalists have been killed or intimidated, according to human rights groups.

The bombing on Monday came hours after the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was gunned down by unknown attackers. Local news reports said that he was killed by men on a motorcycle while on his way to court. As the news of Mr. Kasi’s death spread through Quetta, dozens of lawyers went to Civil Hospital, where his body had been taken for an autopsy.

As they protested the killing, a powerful blast ripped through the entrance of the hospital’s emergency ward. Television footage showed dozens of lawyers running for cover as gunfire echoed in the background.

Some lawyers could be seen pushing a stretcher bearing a wounded colleague, as others urged them to safety. “Get inside! Get inside!” one lawyer could be heard saying, as others rushed into the hospital building. Two cameramen working for local news networks were among those killed.

The bombing left a trail of destruction. The charred bodies of victims lay in pools of blood. Several vehicles parked nearby were damaged, and windows of buildings were shattered.

One witness, Hajji Abdul Haq, who survived the bombing with minor injuries, said in a telephone interview that he was standing outside the hospital entrance with other lawyers, waiting to receive the body of their slain colleague.

“I was in the second row, senior lawyers were in the first row,” Mr. Haq said. “Suddenly, there was a deafening explosion.” Rescue workers pulled Mr. Haq from under a pile of bodies. “I lost my hearing for almost an hour after the blast,” he said.

Mr. Haq said the suicide bomber was dressed in the traditional “lawyers’ uniform” of Pakistan — a black suit and black tie. The bomb went off right as the attacker moved toward the center of the crowd.

Acme Roger, a cameraman for GEO TV, told his network that he was inside the hospital when he heard a loud explosion outside. “Smoke spread quickly and one could hear loud screams,” Mr. Roger said. “When we got out of the building, there were dead bodies everywhere and people were shouting and screaming, trying to find their loved ones.”

Sam Zarifi, the Asia director of the International Commission of Jurists, said in a statement, “This attack targeted mostly lawyers and intellectuals (many of them from the Pashtun community) who had gathered at the hospital to mourn the loss of one of their own.

“As such, it constituted a serious loss for the legal community and increases existing pressure on the independence of the bar.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the bombing on Monday, urging the law enforcement authorities to improve security in Quetta. “No one will be allowed to disturb the peace in the province that has been restored thanks to the countless sacrifices by the security forces, police and the people of Baluchistan,” he said in a statement.

By the afternoon, Gen. Raheel Sharif, the Pakistani Army chief, had reached the city to visit victims and express solidarity. General Sharif then led a meeting of senior security officials, according to Lt. Gen Asim Saleem Bajwa, the army spokesman.

General Bajwa, in a message posted on Twitter, claimed that the attack was “an attempt to undermine the improved security” in Baluchistan, specifically targeting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a multibillion-dollar endeavor by both countries that includes infrastructure networks and energy projects.

Soon after, Mr. Sharif arrived in Quetta and with General Sharif visited the wounded at a military hospital.

A spokesman for Baluchistan’s government, Anwar ul-Haq Kakar, said that the perpetrators would soon be brought to justice. “This is indeed a highly condemnable act, but such cowardly acts cannot shake our resolve of eradicating the menace of terrorism,” he said by telephone.

The Pakistani Bar Association said lawyers across the country would hold a three-day strike in all courts and spend a week in mourning.

Follow Salman Masood on Twitter @salmanmasood.

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2016, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens During Rally at a Hospital in Pakistan.

Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens at Pakistani Hospital in Quetta,
NYT, AUG. 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/world/asia/quetta-pakistan-
blast-hospital.html

Suicide Bombing

Kills at Least 20 in Somalia

AUG. 21, 2016

The New York Times

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

and HUSSEIN MOHAMED

NAIROBI, Kenya — A suicide bomb rocked the Somali town of Galkayo on Sunday, killing at least 20 people and showing that Islamist militants, despite recent setbacks, can still plan and execute deadly attacks anywhere in the country.

Galkayo, a midsize town in central Somalia, had been quiet in recent months.

Yet that suddenly changed at 10 a.m. on Sunday when militants detonated a deafening bomb in a market, sending a column of black smoke shooting into the sky. A squad of militants stormed a nearby government building, engaging in gun battles with security forces.

“One of the blasts was so huge, I was really shocked,” said Abdirahman Abdweli, a student in the city.

The explosion ripped the roofs off several buildings, scattering sharp pieces of corrugated metal and debris across the area.

The death toll was not immediately clear. The Shabab militant group, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said 30 people had been killed. Somali health officials and residents said the number was closer to 20, with dozens wounded.

The United States is increasingly watching Somalia, a poor, unstable country that has spewed violence across its borders for more than 20 years. On Aug. 10, American Special Forces assisted Somali troops in killing several members of the Shabab who were running an illegal checkpoint. Somali officials said the Shabab had lost “senior members” in that raid.

In recent years, American airstrikes have killed many Shabab members, including both foot soldiers and top commanders.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to hold talks on Somalia with African officials in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. State Department officials said he would also focus on South Sudan, which has plunged into bloodshed and chaos as well.

Somalia is scheduled to hold an election this year to choose its Parliament and president. But because of the rampant instability and the paucity of functioning government institutions, citizens will not be lining up to vote. Instead, clan elders will select delegates, who will then choose the politicians.

Somali intellectuals have criticized this plan, saying the government is using the process as a way to stay in power and siphon more money from donor nations like the United States.

“The prevailing Somali public view is that the electoral process will not be free, fair and transparent as vehemently claimed,” said Mohamud M. Uluso, a former Somali government official.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Hussein Mohamed from Mogadishu, Somalia.

A version of this article appears in print on August 22, 2016,
on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline:
At Least 20 Die in Attack on Market in Somalia.

Suicide Bombing Kills at Least 20 in Somalia,
NYT, AUG. 21, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/world/africa/
suicide-bombing-kills-at-least-20-in-somalia.html

Syria’s Horrors Visit Turkey Again

as Bomber Attacks Kurdish Wedding

AUG. 21, 2016

The New York Times

By TIM ARANGO

and CEYLAN YEGINSU

ISTANBUL — The wedding on Saturday night was winding down, and some guests had already left. But the music was still playing and people were still dancing in the narrow streets of Gaziantep, a city not far from the Syrian border.

Just then a child — no more than 14 years old, Turkey’s president said later — meandered into the gathering and detonated a vest of explosives.

Suddenly, the most joyous of occasions became a scene of blood and gore, with body parts scattered all around. Once again, the horrors of Syria’s civil war had visited Turkey.

The devastating bombing of the Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep killed more than 50 people, for which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Islamic State, the terrorist group that controls a swath of land straddling the frontier between Iraq and Syria.

“In this area, we live in a ring of fire,” said Hilmi Karaca, a Kurdish activist who witnessed the explosion. “We live in a place where mothers are weeping for their dead children just hours after crying tears of joy at a wedding.”

The attack was the deadliest in a string of terrorist bombings that have struck Turkey this year, as it grapples with the spiraling chaos of spillover from the war in Syria. Bombings this year that Turkish officials have blamed the Islamic State for have struck Istanbul’s old city, near the Blue Mosque; its most famous shopping boulevard, Istiklal Avenue; and, in June, Istanbul’s main airport, among the busiest in Europe.

For years, critics have said that Turkey contributed to the chaos — allowing extremist rebels to cross its territory on their way to fight in Syria — to advance its goal of toppling the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. At the outset of the war in 2011, Mr. Erdogan was confident that Mr. Assad would quickly fall, as the dictators of Egypt and Tunisia had. But as the war ground on, Turkey increasingly found itself drawn in, with millions of refugees fleeing across the border and, over the last year, a spate of attacks within Turkey.

At the same time, Kurdish militants in the southeast resumed a stalled war against the Turkish government, emboldened by the success of their brethren in Syria, where Kurds have carved out a region of autonomy in the country’s east.

Now, Turkey finds itself with three enemies in the Syrian civil war — Mr. Assad, the Islamic State and Kurdish rebels — and escalating chaos within its own borders. The attack on Saturday in Gaziantep demonstrated how those conflicts sometimes overlap. The Islamic State, which has fought Kurds in Syria in cities like Kobani, have also targeted Kurds within Turkey, as they apparently did on Saturday by striking the wedding.

Turkey is also reeling from a failed military coup last month that aimed to topple the government of Mr. Erdogan and left at least 240 people dead. That conspiracy was blamed on followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric in self-exile in Pennsylvania. Mr. Erdogan said on Saturday that there was no difference between the various terrorist organizations — the Islamic State, Kurdish militants or followers of Mr. Gulen — that are attacking the country.

Hours before the attack on Saturday, the Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, met with journalists over breakfast at an old Ottoman palace, once used by sultans for hunting excursions, that overlooks the Bosporus in Istanbul. He said Turkey would take a more active role in diplomatic efforts to end the war, working closely with world powers like Russia and Iran, two of Mr. Assad’s most ardent backers.

Calling the Syrian conflict “the bleeding wound of the globe,” he said Turkey would accept a role for Mr. Assad during an interim period while the long-term future of the country was being resolved.

This was a slight shift in policy, as Turkey has long been adamant that Mr. Assad must go before any serious peace talks could take place. But it was unclear whether that matters this far into the conflict, and with Mr. Assad strengthened by Russian military support.

“In the long term, can Syria bear Assad?” Mr. Yildirim said. “No way.”

In normal times, Gaziantep is famous for its cuisine, especially baklava, the sweet pastry made with pistachios grown nearby. Before war broke out, busloads of Syrians crossed the border almost daily to shop in Gaziantep, as Mr. Erdogan pushed stronger economic ties with Syria.

Yet in recent years the city became a hub for lives upended — and preoccupied — by the civil war in Syria. Spies, foreign fighters, diplomats, journalists, relief workers and refugees passed through the city, sometimes all gathering at the same Starbucks. In the earlier days of the conflict it was a place of intrigue, transformed much as the Pakistani border city of Peshawar was during the 1980s, when American-backed rebels moved through on their way to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

And then Gaziantep became more sinister and violent. The police found an Islamic State bomb-making facility in the city, which they said was used in an attack in Ankara last year that killed more than 100 people. The bomber who struck Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue came from there, officials said. The Islamic State also carried out murders of Syrian journalists in the city.

On Saturday, the city’s place as not just a remote transit hub for the war but a battleground itself came into focus again.

“We had just walked past the wedding and offered our good wishes when we heard the blast,” said Ibrahim Ates, a local man. “Suddenly people started running past us. When we went back to see what had happened, everyone was on the floor, and there were body parts scattered everywhere and blood splattered on the walls.”

Mahmut Togrul, a lawmaker with the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party who on Sunday visited the scene of the attack, said the wedding had been a traditional Kurdish ceremony and had taken place in a predominantly Kurdish neighborhood. He said that many of the victims — at least 51 people were killed and 69 more wounded, Mr. Erdogan said on Sunday — were children.

That the perpetrator of the attack and so many of its victims were so young was a potent illustration of the degradation of the Syrian war as it has inflamed the region. Children have suffered immensely – one devastating image of a Syrian boy injured in an airstrike in Aleppo last week appeared on the front of newspapers around the world, a jarring reminder of the human cost of the war. The Islamic State, meanwhile, recruits boys as suicide bombers across Iraq and Syria.

The bride and groom on Saturday, Besna and Nurettin Akdogan, survived without serious injuries. Neighbors said they were cousins who had been engaged for six months. After being released from the hospital, the bride said, “They turned our wedding into a blood bath,” according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency.

In Gaziantep on Sunday, a mass funeral was held at the Yesilkent cemetery. One of the mourners was Arif Yugmen, 35, who had left the wedding just before the attack.

When he heard of the bombing, he said, he went back and took some of the wounded victims to the hospital in his car.

Mr. Yugmen said the victims included so many children because they had gathered away from the folk dancing, in a place closer to the site of the blast.

Nearby, Mizgin Gurbuzun, grieved over her dead 16-year-old son, falling to her knees beside his coffin.

Rocking back and forth, and crying, she wailed, “My martyr son has gone.”

Follow Tim Arango @tarangoNYT and Ceylan Yeginsu @CeylanWrites on Twitter.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 22, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Turkey, Child Turns Wedding Into Blood Bath.

Syria’s Horrors Visit Turkey Again as Bomber Attacks Kurdish Wedding,
NYT, AUG. 21, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/world/europe/turkey-
wedding-attack-isis-blamed.html

Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens

at Pakistani Hospital in Quetta

AUG. 8, 2016

The New York Times

By SALMAN MASOOD

Follow Salman Masood on Twitter @salmanmasood.

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting.

Get news and analysis from Asia and around the world delivered to your inbox every day with the Today’s Headlines: Asian Morning newsletter. Sign up here.

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2016,
on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline:
Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens During Rally at a Hospital
in Pakistan.

Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens at Pakistani Hospital in Quetta,
NYT, AUG. 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/world/asia/
quetta-pakistan-blast-hospital.html

Blast Kills Dozens

in Kurdish-Held Syrian Town;

Crisis in Aleppo Worsens

JULY 27, 2016

The New York Times

By HWAIDA SAAD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Dozens of people in a Kurdish-controlled town in northeastern Syria died after an explosion on Wednesday, while a humanitarian crisis in the rebel-held sections of Aleppo, a city in the country’s northwest, intensified.

A truck loaded with explosives blew up on the western edge of the Kurdish-controlled town, Qamishli, on Wednesday morning. There were reports of a second blast a short while later, though the cause was not clear. At least 37 people were killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.

“It was so disturbing,” Dawood Dawood, a resident of Qamishli and an official with the Assyrian Democratic Organization, said via Viber, a messaging app. “I saw burned cars, at least 10 damaged buildings.”

Mr. Dawood said he had rushed to the scene after the truck attack, which occurred on a highway near a Kurdish police station. Mr. Dawood said he thought the second explosion may have been set off by the first.

“It was a busy road,” he said. “There were many cars, and there were generators that feed the area with power; this is why the damage and death toll were so high.”

The Islamic State issued a statement calling the attacker a martyr, but it stopped short of directly claiming responsibility. The statement made reference to only one explosion.

Qamishli is a center of activity for Rojava, an enclave that Kurds began carving out in 2012, early in the Syrian civil war, and of the Democratic Union Party, which has gotten arms, equipment and training from the United States, and some smaller Kurdish parties. Turkey considers the Democratic Union Party to be a front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant group that has waged an insurgency in Turkey for decades.

A humanitarian crisis has also been intensifying in Aleppo, a large city that is divided between rebel and government forces.

Unicef said on Tuesday that four hospitals in the eastern section of the city, as well as a blood bank, had been hit by airstrikes over the weekend, “disrupting key lifesaving health services for up to 300,000 civilians.”

A 2-day-old baby died in an incubator from disruptions to his oxygen supply as a result of airstrikes that damaged a Unicef-supported hospital, which was reportedly struck twice in less than 12 hours.

“All hospitals hit over the 48-hour-period are in the Al Shaar neighborhood, a location with several health facilities in close vicinity to one another,” Unicef said. “These hospitals make up half of all health facilities operating in the area.”

At least 60 percent of public hospitals in the country have closed or are only partly functional.

In the rebel-held eastern part of Aleppo, at least six more people died in airstrikes on Wednesday, according to a medical group operating in the area. More than 50 civilians were killed on Monday, according to the White Helmets, a rescue group operating in rebel areas. Forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, control most of the western part of the city.

Food is in short supply, and Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, warned recently that basic necessities were running out. The United Nations has backed calls for cease-fires in the air raids on Aleppo.

“Shops are almost empty from food, prices of bread are soaring, there is no fuel, electricity has become rare and expensive,” said Dr. Omar Abu al-Ezz, who works at a hospital in rebel-held Aleppo that is supported by the Syrian American Medical Society. “Sometimes hospitals are obliged to do amputations for the wounded due to scarcity of medication.”

Zaher Azzaher, an Aleppo resident and activist, said via Facebook Messenger: “The siege in Aleppo is getting worst day after day, number of people here are decreasing, the feeling of boredom is growing.” He added, “There’s nothing left in Aleppo but air.”

Follow Hwaida Saad on Twitter @hwaida_saad.

Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Paris.

Blast Kills Dozens in Kurdish-Held Syrian Town;
Crisis in Aleppo Worsens,
NYT, JULY 27, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/
world/middleeast/qamishli-aleppo-syria.html

Middle East

As ISIS Loosens Grip,

U.S. and Iraq

Prepare for Grinding Insurgency

JULY 25, 2016

By MICHAEL SCHMIDT

and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD — The Islamic State’s latest suicide attack in Baghdad, which killed nearly 330 people, foreshadows a long and bloody insurgency, according to American diplomats and commanders, as the group reverts to its guerrilla roots because its territory is shrinking in Iraq and Syria.

Already, officials say, many Islamic State fighters who lost battles in Falluja and Ramadi have blended back into the largely Sunni civilian populations there, and are biding their time to conduct future terrorist attacks. And with few signs that the beleaguered Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, can effectively forge an inclusive partnership with Sunnis, many senior American officials warn that a military victory in the last urban stronghold of Mosul, which they hope will be achieved by the end of the year, will not be sufficient to stave off a lethal insurgency.

“To defeat an insurgency, Iraq would need to move forward on its political and economic reform agenda,” Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, the top American commander in Iraq, said in an email.

A return to guerrilla warfare in Iraq, while the United States and its allies still combat the Islamic State in Syria, would pose one of the first major challenges to the next American president, who will take office in January. American public opinion has so far supported President Obama’s deployment of roughly 5,000 troops to help Iraq reclaim territory it lost to the Islamic State in 2014, but it is not clear whether political support would dissipate in a sustained effort to fight insurgents.

For American diplomats and commanders, the specter of an insurgency resurrects some of the most bitter memories from the United States’ involvement in Iraq over the past 13 years. Officials voice concern about how that type of mayhem — which was led by an earlier iteration of the Islamic State and nearly crippled the Iraqi government when the United States had more than 100,000 troops in the country — could affect the stability of Iraq and the broader campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

In a recent visit to Iraq, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter acknowledged these looming challenges, noting that toppling the Islamic State in urban centers like Mosul “won’t establish control over the entirety of the territory,” and that the militants would “try to terrorize the population.”

The Islamic State is increasingly fighting less like a conventional army than “a more terrorist-type force,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, said last week. On the battlefield, the Islamic State has redoubled its use of suicide bombers and ambushes to attack Iraqi security forces. Despite losing about half the territory it seized in Iraq, it carried out the suicide attack in Baghdad this month, one of the deadliest bombings in Iraqi history.

“When ISIS’s army is defeated in Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq, there will still be ISIS terrorist cells that will attempt to continue to carry out the kind of terrorist attacks we have seen in Baghdad and elsewhere in recent months,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former top American commander in Iraq, said in an email.

Senior Iraqi officials agree. “Absolutely, Daesh will remain a potential threat to Iraq,” the country’s foreign minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, told reporters in Washington last week, using an Arabic term for the group.

American military officials in Baghdad said that they had not seen the Islamic State mass more than 100 troops on the battlefield since December, when a group of several hundred attacked a base in northern Iraq. “We have seen more and more of their guys with vests on trying to run into Iraqi Army headquarters buildings or in the middle of a fight into a big group of soldiers,” said Col. Christopher Garver, the military spokesman in Iraq.

After losing battles to the Iraqis, some Islamic State fighters have tried to blend back into groups of civilians who have fled the violence, according to Iraqi commanders.

“We have hurt ISIS’ morale, but nobody can deny that ISIS still has its sleeper cells, and we expect anything from it,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul Wahab al-Saidi, the commander of Iraqi operations in Falluja.

“A number of ISIS fighters were found among the displaced people in Falluja, and one of them even blew himself up,” he said. “They are criminal, and we must expect anything from the criminals because they would do anything.”

The United States and other countries in the coalition countering the Islamic State are adopting a series of measures that they believe will help the Iraqis defeat the remnants of the group in the coming months.

In recent weeks, specially trained American explosives experts, including a three-star Army general, and new bomb-detection devices have been sent to Baghdad to help stem suicide and car-bomb attacks. The Danes, who are part of the coalition, have begun training border patrol agents.

The first class of 300 Iraqi border patrol agents completed a four-week training course on Wednesday, Colonel Garver said. The plan is to train five more similarly sized classes and use them to patrol the border with Jordan and Syria.

The American-led coalition has focused intensely for months on the military campaign to retake Mosul — a dauntingly complex task. But the dozens of defense and foreign ministers meeting in Washington last week were equally concerned with the aftermath of the fight for Mosul and the city’s security, reconstruction and governance.

Western and Iraqi officials are preparing plans to address the humanitarian needs of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians displaced by the violence, and the importance of restoring local government in Mosul and other areas controlled by the Islamic State for the past two years.

“The local governance plan has to be ready to go,” said Brett McGurk, Mr. Obama’s special envoy for combating the Islamic State.

Even if the operations to take Mosul are ahead of schedule, there will almost certainly be a new American president in office by the time that operation is complete. And although it is not clear how committed that administration will be to the fight in Iraq, American commanders are planning for an enduring presence of forces to help the Iraqis.

“After the defeat of ISIL in Iraq, the U.S. and our partners will need to retain a presence there that can help the Iraqis secure their borders and hunt the terrorist threats within them,” General MacFarland said.

Follow Michael Schmidt @nytmike and Eric Schmitt @EricSchmittNYT on Twitter.

Michael Schmidt reported from Baghdad and Washington,
and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. and Iraq Are Set for ISIS to Dig Itself In.

As ISIS Loosens Grip, U.S. and Iraq Prepare for Grinding Insurgency,
NYT, July 25, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/world/middleeast/
isis-iraq-insurgency.html

ISIS Says Its ‘Soldiers’

Attacked Church in France,

Killing Priest

JULY 26, 2016

The New York Times

By ADAM NOSSITER,

ALISSA J. RUBIN

and BENOÎT MORENNE

ST.-ÉTIENNE-DU-ROUVRAY, France — Attendance was sparse at the 9 a.m. Mass on Tuesday at the Église St.-Étienne, a 17th-century church in a working-class town in Normandy. Many parishioners were on vacation; so was the parish priest.

Mass was ending around 9:30 a.m. when two young men with knives burst in. They forced the auxiliary priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, 85, to kneel. When he resisted, they slit his throat. They held several worshipers and at least one nun hostage, while another nun escaped. Officers from a specialized police unit descended on the church. A short while later, officers shot the young men dead as they emerged from the church.

The brutality in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a suburb of Rouen in northern France, was the latest in a series of assaults that have left Europe stunned, fearful and angry. The Islamic State took responsibility for the killing. Two of its “soldiers,” it said, had attacked a church “in response to the call to target Crusader coalition states.” By killing a priest as he celebrated Mass, the group framed the assault as an act of religious war between Muslims and Christians.

Whether it will be perceived by the French as a struggle between religions and cultures is less clear. For now, some French politicians seemed willing to take the bait and use the language of sectarian and cultural division. But the Roman Catholic Church, the French government and several professors said churches were, above all, a symbol of France, much like other iconic French milieus attacked by the Islamic militants, who also reject secular life.

“The history of France is very associated with Catholics, and to strike a church is to strike one of those elements that constitutes the identity of France,” said Guillaume Goubert, the editor of La Croix, a Catholic daily newspaper.

The attack was the fourth linked to the Islamic State in Western Europe in less than two weeks, after a Bastille Day rampage in Nice that killed 84 people; an ax and knife attack on a train in Würzburg, Germany, that injured five; and a suicide bombing at a wine bar in Ansbach, Germany.

“We must realize that the terrorists will not give up until we stop them,” President François Hollande said after racing to St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray and meeting with the priest’s family and the town’s mayor, Hubert Wulfranc. “It is our will. The French must know that they are threatened, that we are not the only country — Germany is, as well as others — and that their strength lies in their unity.”

By the evening, one man was in custody, and the police were conducting raids and homing in on the possibility that both attackers were from the area.

Redwan Chentouf, 18, said he went to secondary school with one of the men believed to have been involved in the attack, whom he identified as Adel Kermiche, 19. The newspaper Le Monde, which identified the teenager as Adel K., said he had tried twice last year to enter Syria, and was placed under electronic monitoring by the police in March. The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, confirmed the young man’s identity and said that he was monitored and that he had made two attempts to go to Syria but was stopped.

Mr. Chentouf recalled: “At the last Ramadan, he said we should all go to Syria. He tried to push propaganda on us.” Mr. Chentouf said Mr. Kermiche had been a normal teenager, who drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes. He said he last saw Mr. Kermiche on Saturday at a subway station in Rouen. He was wearing a long robe and had a beard. “He was perfectly calm,” Mr. Chentouf said.

The attack underscored the vulnerability of France, which has sustained three major terrorist attacks in 19 months: an assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and other locations around Paris in January 2015, which killed 17 people; coordinated attacks on a soccer stadium, the Bataclan concert hall, and cafes and restaurants in and around Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people; and the Nice truck attack.

“I understand this feeling of helplessness, but if the French people absorb this truth that it is a long war which will require resilience and resistance, we need to form a block and stay united,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the French television channel TF1.

This was hardly the first time that the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists have singled out Christians. But in the past, the Christians were primarily in the Middle East, not Europe. Christians in Iraq were repeatedly targeted both in Baghdad and in the area around Mosul — and that was before the Islamic State expelled every Christian from Mosul and took it over in June 2014.

France has been concerned about the threat against churches for some time. In April 2015, the authorities arrested Sid Ahmed Ghlam, 24, an Algerian computer science student. He had amassed a trove of weapons in a Paris apartment and was thought to be planning an attack on at least one church. He was a suspect in the killing of a 32-year-old woman, Aurélie Châtelain, whose body was found in a parked car in Villejuif, a Paris suburb.

Mr. Ghlam had been ordered by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian militant who went on to help organize the November attacks on Paris, to open fire on a church in Villejuif, according to a report by French antiterrorism police, but the attack was never carried out.

Since the Villejuif plot was foiled, many houses of worship in France, including mosques and synagogues, have been on a heightened state of alert. The country has roughly 45,000 Catholic churches, so protecting all of them is a difficult task.

Vincent Fauvel, a spokesman for the French bishops conference, said in a telephone interview that he was not aware of any specific threat against the Église St.-Étienne before the attack.

St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray has many retired chemical and metal workers and is a peaceful community, residents said, with a substantial immigrant population. The parish priest is of Congolese ancestry; the town’s mosque opened in 2000 on land donated by the Catholic parish.
France

Pascal Quilan, who works at a funeral home near the church, said that around 9:30 a.m.: “I heard several gunshots. Then, loads of police.” He added, referring to Father Hamel: “It’s a huge loss for the town. He was someone with lots of humility.”

The Rouen unit of the B.R.I., a police team that specializes in major crimes like armed robberies and kidnappings, “arrived extremely quickly and positioned itself around the church,” an Interior Ministry spokesman, Pierre-Henry Brandet, told reporters.

At the Vatican, a spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Pope Francis was horrified at the “barbaric killing” of a priest and issued “the most severe condemnation of all forms of hatred.”

Mr. Hollande told the pope on Tuesday “that when a priest is attacked, it is the whole of France that is hurt, and that all will be done to protect our churches and our places of worship,” the Élysée Palace said in a statement.

The attack drew condemnation from across French society. Dalil Boubakeur, the former president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, called the attack “barbaric and criminal” and declared that “Muslims stand together behind the government to defend France and its institutions.” The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions said that the attack “marks a new stage in the spread of terrorism in France” and that “the authorities and the population must now quickly adapt to this new emergency.”

But the attack also renewed criticism of Mr. Hollande and his Socialist government from his political rivals. “We must be merciless,” Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Hollande’s predecessor as president and the leader of the opposition Republicans, said in a statement. “The legal quibbling, precautions and pretexts for insufficient action are not acceptable.”

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front who is expected to run for the presidency, said that both major parties had failed the country. “All those who have governed us for 30 years bear an immense responsibility,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s revolting to watch them bickering!”

Correction: July 27, 2016

An earlier version of this article gave an outdated title for Dalil Boubakeur, a leader of the Muslim community in France. He is a former president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, not the current president.

Adam Nossiter reported from St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, and Alissa J. Rubin and Benoît Morenne from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Daphné Anglès, Lilia Blaise and Martin de Bourmont from Paris; Hannah Olivennes from London; Rukmini Callimachi from Stuttgart, Germany; and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2016,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
ISIS Says Its ‘Soldiers’ Killed Priest in Knifing at French Church.

ISIS Says Its ‘Soldiers’ Attacked Church in France, Killing Priest,
NYT, July 26, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/
world/europe/normandy-france-church-attack.html

Kabul Bombing

Adds New Layers of Agony

for Afghanistan’s Hazaras

JULY 24, 2016

The New York Times

By MUJIB MASHAL,

ZAHRA NADER

and JAWAD SUKHANYAR

KABUL, Afghanistan — One after another, the bodies arrived on the steep hill in western Kabul.

For much of Sunday afternoon, an excavator was flattening the dusty area as men with shovels and pickaxes dug graves — four rows of 20 or so, packed so close that if the dead could stretch out their arms, they would touch those next to them.

In the hours that followed, nearly two dozen of the at least 80 protesters killed in a bombing claimed by the Islamic State on Saturday were buried here, in overlapping ceremonies that blurred into one large scene of public mourning. As the final prayer for one body lowered into a grave was being recited, dirt was shoveled onto another body at the next.

“Oh, brothers, slow! Slow!” one mourner at the grave of Muhammad Hassan, a 25-year-old construction worker killed in the bombing, urged the men piling dirt over the next grave. Dust covered the white turban of the mullah who crouched over Mr. Hassan’s headstone, reading from a little book of prayer.

The attack on peaceful protesters in Kabul — who were mostly from the Hazara ethnic minority — stirred an international outcry, in part because it was the first time that the Islamic State’s leadership in Syria had claimed responsibility for such a deadly strike in Afghanistan.

But some here voiced skepticism that the terrorist group, whose fighters in Afghanistan are concentrated in the east, was behind it. The detail hardly seemed to matter to others, who see the bombing as another in a long procession of attacks born of a chaotic and unending war. Many of the mourners burying their dead on the hill, or continuing their protest near a convention center, bitterly accused the Afghan government of failing to protect its people no matter the threat.

The protesters on Saturday were marching to demand better services and infrastructure for Hazara areas of Afghanistan. Instead, they joined a long list of Hazaras victimized because of either religious differences or political affiliations. They have long been treated as second-class citizens, were hunted by the Taliban regime and, over the past year, increasingly targeted by Afghanistan’s offshoot of the Islamic State because of their Shiite beliefs.

The stories of many of the victims spoke to a cycle of violence that continues to disrupt Afghan lives across generations.

Mr. Hassan, buried in grave No. 4, had lost his father to Afghanistan’s Communist government when he was a child, said his uncle, Hajji Muhammad Safi Jaffary, who raised him. Now, another act of violence deprives Mr. Hassan’s children, a 5-year-old boy and an infant girl, of their own father.

“I feel the scar of my brother, and now this,” Mr. Jaffary said. “I loved him more than my own children. I lost my spine.”

Sharif Doulatshahi, an Education Ministry employee, was killed at almost the same age that his father was when he died — in his 30s. Mr. Doulatshahi and his brother were raised by their single mother, and he leaves behind his wife and a young daughter.

Families also spoke of painful searches before they could find the bodies of their loved ones at Kabul hospitals overwhelmed by the attack’s toll.

Late into Sunday, Muhammad Daud and his family were still looking for his cousin Aziz Muhammad, a 27-year-old graduate student in international law who had participated in the protests. They had searched at least four hospitals with no luck.

“At the 400-bed hospital, they took us to a pile of human flesh stuffed in sacks and told us to look for him,” Mr. Daud said. “It was not possible to find him in those sacks.”

Naweedullah Bahadur, 22, was a student of dentistry at Kabul University, his cousin Zabihullah said. Mr. Bahadur’s family searched for his body until 2 a.m. Sunday with no luck. When his relatives resumed their search the next morning, they found a photo of him among a pile of pictures on a hospital table for families to identify. He had wounds in the back of his head, as well as his forehead.

Mr. Bahadur was an avid soccer fan and player, though his friends gathered at his grave disagreed about whether he had rooted for Arsenal or Real Madrid.

“We were waiting for him at the field last night,” said his friend Hajji Yaha, who played soccer with him three times a week. “We called 20 times — no answer.”

When his coffin was taken home for a brief visit before the burial, Mr. Bahadur’s devastated mother smashed her forehead against it and dropped unconscious.

Before arriving at the hilltop, most of the bodies made a stop for a funeral prayer at a convention center in western Kabul. Much of the continuing antigovernment protest, cleared overnight from the roundabout where the bombing occurred, had shifted to the convention center also.
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The protest’s central point was to demand the routing of an electricity line — and, with it, roads and infrastructure — through Bamian Province, a Hazara-dominated region in central Afghanistan. After trying for weeks to head off the demonstration, insisting that more services had been routed to Hazara communities over the past year, President Ashraf Ghani’s government allowed the march to proceed on Saturday. Still, officials said they saw the protesters as being manipulated by the political opposition.

As the demonstration continued at the convention center, emotions ran high, with anger expressed at Mr. Ghani’s government, and at an older generation of Hazara leaders they felt had betrayed them to strike deals with the government and abandon the protest at the last minute.

When a member of Parliament associated with the older generation of Hazara politicians arrived, the windows of his vehicles were smashed, and he quickly left.

On the hilltop, men of all ages continued to dig graves as the bodies arrived. Headstones, each bearing the name and grave number of the victim scribbled in red ink on both sides, were unloaded from vehicles and carried on people’s backs up the hill.

The mullahs struggled to make time for all the final prayers. Khadim Hussain Hassany said he had performed the final prayers for five victims, while Naser Mahdawi had performed three.

Ahmad Jawad, a 20-year-old worker at an electronic store, said he had barely missed the explosion during the protest. After posing for a photograph with his friends, he had walked to the side to help set up a protest tent.

“All those friends in the photo — they were all martyred,” he said, taking a break from digging graves for them.

Mohammad Fahim Abed contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 2016,
on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline:
Row After Row, Burying a New Ledger of Civilian Victims
in Afghanistan.

Kabul Bombing Adds New Layers of Agony for Afghanistan’s Hazaras,
NYT, July 24, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/
world/asia/hazara-afghanistan-victims.html

ISIS Claims

Truck Attacker in France

Was Its ‘Soldier’

JULY 16, 2016

The New York Times

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

and AURELIEN BREEDEN

NICE, France — The Islamic State claimed on Saturday that the man who attacked the seaside city of Nice was one of the group’s “soldiers.” France’s defense minister promptly blamed the terrorist network for inspiring the assault, while its top law enforcement official said the attacker, who was not previously known to intelligence agencies, may have “radicalized himself very quickly.”

The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, carried out the assault on Thursday evening using a 19-ton refrigerated truck and an automatic pistol. The death toll remained at 84, but the number of injured rose to 303, of whom 121 were in hospitals, 26 of them in intensive care.

France, traumatized by three major terrorist assaults in 19 months, began three days of national mourning on Saturday.

The Islamic State had kept silent on the Nice attack until Saturday morning, when it declared, in a bulletin issued in Arabic and in English on its Amaq News Agency channel: “Executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the Islamic State. He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fight the Islamic State.”

The claim must be greeted with caution, because there was yet no evidence suggesting that the driver was radicalized, or had even been exposed to the Islamic State’s propaganda.

After a husband and wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, the Amaq News Agency described them as “two supporters,” making it clear that the Islamic State had not directed their actions. But after a gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., last month, having pledged loyalty to the group, it called him a “fighter.”

In a statement on Saturday on its radio station, the Islamic State referred to Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel as “a soldier” who had responded to the group’s call “to target states participating in the crusader coalition that fights the caliphate.”

In 2014, the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called on the group’s followers to attack Westerners in retaliation for strikes by the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He has repeatedly singled out France, which is part of the coalition, as a main enemy.

No evidence has emerged that Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel got training or orders from the Islamic State, unlike the perpetrators of attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13 and Brussels on March 22. The Islamic State has blurred the line between operations planned and carried out by its core fighters and those carried out by sympathizers inspired, only at a distance, to commit violence.

But on Saturday, France’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said: “I remind you that Daesh’s ideologue, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has for several weeks repeated calls to attack directly, even individually, Frenchmen, in particular, or Americans, wherever they are, by any means necessary.” Daesh is an Arabic name for the Islamic State.

“It is murder, and Daesh’s claim of responsibility comes later, as has happened in other recent events,” Mr. Le Drian added. “Even if Daesh doesn’t do the organizing, Daesh inspires this terrorist spirit, against which we are fighting.”

Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a native of Tunisia, had a history of petty crime going back to 2010. He received a six-month suspended sentence this year for assaulting a motorist, but was not on the radar of French intelligence agencies. Indeed, he seemed more like a surly misfit — he beat his wife, until she threw him out — than a prospective terrorist.

The country’s top law enforcement official, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, said Saturday: “The individual who committed this absolutely despicable, unspeakable crime was not known by the intelligence services, as he had not stood out over the past years — whether through court convictions or through his activity — for support of radical Islamist ideology.”

But Mr. Cazeneuve added: “It seems that he radicalized himself very quickly. In any case, these are the first elements that have come to light through the testimony of his acquaintances.”

In Msaken, Tunisia, the attacker’s father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel, told Agence France-Presse on Friday night that his son had depression, and that he “had almost no links to religion.”

“He didn’t pray,” the father continued. “He didn’t fast. He drank alcohol, and even used drugs.”

He said of his son, “From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown.”

“He would become angry, and he shouted,” he said. “He would break anything he saw in front of him.”

The son was prescribed medication for emotional problems, the elder Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel said, adding that his son was “always alone, always depressed” and often silent.

The father said he and his family had almost no contact with his son since he left for France. The son appears to have arrived in Nice around 2005 and to have returned to Tunisia for a sister’s wedding in 2012.

The Huffington Post quoted Rabab Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a sister of the attacker, as saying her brother “did not drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but he also did not pray and never entered a mosque in his life.” She added: “He was just not stable psychologically and mentally. His wife and her mother both complained about his violent behavior toward her.”

Four people acquainted with Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel are in police custody, along with his estranged wife.

Since Thursday evening, several French officials — particularly from right-leaning parties opposed to President François Hollande’s Socialist government — have criticized the government’s handling of intelligence gathering and law enforcement, especially after attacks in January and November killed a total of 147 people.

Christian Estrosi, the president of the region encompassing Nice, wrote in an open letter on Saturday that he had asked for additional security for Bastille Day, but was rebuffed because there was no specific threat.

“Why, while I have for the past two years never ceased to ask the government for new means of fighting terrorism, means to arm our national and municipal police, regulatory means, legislative means, have I never received an answer?” Mr. Estrosi said.

But Stéphane Le Foll, the chief government spokesman, batted away criticism. “Those who, after a tragedy like this one, come and say that they would have had the solution, that with them, nothing would have happened, I leave them to their total lack of responsibility,” Mr. Le Foll told Europe 1 radio Saturday morning. “When you are talking after the fact, you can always find solutions.”

Mr. Le Foll said security in Nice on the night of the attack was as tight as it was during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, which was held in France and ended on July 10. The tournament was targeted by several plots that the authorities thwarted, according to Mr. Cazeneuve.

The police prefecture for the Alpes-Maritimes department, where Nice is, said security measures on the night of the attack included random searches, the addition of plainclothes officers and the blocking of access points.

The truck “forced its way through, by driving onto the sidewalk,” bypassing a checkpoint where police vehicles blocked the entrance to the promenade, the prefecture said. It added that 64 national and 42 municipal police officers had worked together to secure the area, along with 20 soldiers.

“How did this horrible act occur on this evening?” Mr. Le Foll said. “Because a man decided to rent a truck four days before, all alone, and that he decided to kill people on the 14th of July.”

Mr. Cazeneuve said the French state, or national government, had worked with the City of Nice to protect the Bastille Day celebrations, as well as events like the Cannes film festival, which takes place about 25 miles west of Nice, and the annual Nice carnival.

“If one of the authorities — the state or the city — had at one point considered that the level of security was not adequate, the state or the city could have decided to ban the July 14 festivities, which neither did,” Mr. Cazeneuve said.

People returned to the beach on Saturday, in far smaller numbers than in the days before the attack, but signs of a shaken city were still in evidence. Local officials observed a moment of silence at a makeshift memorial on the Promenade des Anglais, the site of the carnage.

The promenade reopened to vehicular traffic on Saturday afternoon. It had been closed to traffic for the Bastille Day fireworks celebration and remained closed after the attack as it was turned, in effect, into a 1.5-mile crime scene.

Many streets were still blocked, parents were still searching for missing children, and hospital staff members who have been dealing with scores of victims continued to treat dozens of patients, including many children, who had life-threatening injuries.

Follow Alissa J. Rubin @Alissanyt and Aurelien Breeden @aurelienbrd on Twitter.

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Nice, and Aurelien Breeden
from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Lilia Blaise from Nice, Rukmini Callimachi from New York, Benoît Morenne
from Paris, and Nour Youssef from Cairo.

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2016,
on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Islamic State Claims Responsibility for Terrorist Attack in Nice.

ISIS Claims Truck Attacker in France Was Its ‘Soldier’,
NYT, July 16, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/world/europe/isis-nice-france-attack.html

After Attacks on Muslims, Many Ask:

Where Is the Outpouring?

JULY 5, 2016

The New York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

PARIS — In recent days, jihadists killed 41 people at Istanbul’s bustling, shiny airport; 22 at a cafe in Bangladesh; and at least 250 celebrating the final days of Ramadan in Baghdad. Then the Islamic State attacked, again, with bombings in three cities in Saudi Arabia.

By Tuesday, Michel Kilo, a Syrian dissident, was leaning wearily over his coffee at a Left Bank cafe, wondering: Where was the global outrage? Where was the outpouring that came after the same terrorist groups unleashed horror in Brussels and here in Paris? In a supposedly globalized world, do nonwhites, non-Christians and non-Westerners count as fully human?

“All this crazy violence has a goal,” Mr. Kilo, who is Christian, said: to create a backlash against Muslims, divide societies and “make Sunnis feel that no matter what happens, they don’t have any other option.”

This is not the first time that the West seems to have shrugged off massacres in predominantly Muslim countries. But the relative indifference after so many deaths caused by the very groups that have plagued the West is more than a matter of hurt feelings.

One of the primary goals of the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups is to drive a wedge between Sunni Muslims and the wider world, to fuel alienation as a recruiting tool. And when that world appears to show less empathy for the victims of attacks in Muslim nations, who have borne the brunt of the Islamic State’s massacres and predatory rule, it seems to prove their point.

“Why isn’t #PrayForIraq trending?” Razan Hasan of Baghdad posted on Twitter. “Oh yeah no one cares about us.”

Hira Saeed of Ottawa asked on Twitter why Facebook had not activated its Safety Check feature after recent attacks as it did for Brussels, Paris and Orlando, Fla., and why social media had not been similarly filled with the flags of Turkey, Bangladesh and Iraq. “The hypocrisy is the western world is strong,” she wrote.

The global mood increasingly feels like one of atavism, of retreat into narrower identities of nation, politics or sect, with Britain voting to leave the European Union and many Americans supporting the nativist presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

The violence feeds a growing impulse among many in the West to fear Muslims and Arabs, which has already prompted a political crisis over immigration that, in turn, has buttressed extremists’ goals. Europe is convulsing over a movement to reject refugees from Syria and Iraq, who are themselves fleeing violence by jihadists and their own governments.

It is in Syria and Iraq that the Islamic State has established its so-called caliphate, ruling overwhelmingly Muslim populations with the threat of gruesome violence. The group has killed Muslims in those countries by the thousands, by far the largest share of its victims.

When Islamic State militants mowed down cafegoers in Paris in November, people across the world adorned public landmarks and their private Facebook pages with the French flag — not just in Europe and the United States, but also, with an empathy born of experience, in Syria and Iraq.

But over the past week, Facebook activated its Safety Check feature, which allows people in the vicinity of a disaster to mark themselves safe, only after the attack on the Istanbul airport.

The flags of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Bangladesh have not been widely projected on landmarks or adopted as profile pictures. (Photographs on social media showed that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of Europe’s two majority-Muslim countries, the Turkish flag was beamed onto a bridge in Mostar, the scene of sectarian killings in the 1990s.) Some wonder if part of the reason is that three of those flags bear Islamic symbols or slogans.

“More deaths in Iraq in the last week than Paris and Orlando combined but nobody is changing their profile pics, building colours, etc.,” Kareem Rahaman wrote on Twitter.

There are some understandable reasons for the differing reactions. People typically identify more closely with places and cultures that are familiar to them. With Iraq, there is also a degree of fatigue, and a feeling that a bombing there is less surprising than one in Europe.

Deadly attacks have been a constant in Iraq after years of American occupation, followed by a sectarian war in which Sunni and Shiite militias slaughtered civilians of the opposite sect. Still, while terrorist attacks in Europe may feel more surprising to the West — though they have become all too common there, too — that does not explain the relative indifference to attacks in Istanbul, Saudi Arabia or Bangladesh.

“That’s what happens in Iraq,” Sajad Jiyad, a researcher in Iraq who rushed to the scene of the Baghdad bombing and found that one of his friends had died there, wrote on his own blog. “Deaths become just statistics, and the frequency of attacks means the shock doesn’t register as it would elsewhere, or that you have enough time to feel sad or grieve.”

In the Muslim world, the partly sectarian nature of some conflicts shades people’s reactions, producing a kind of internal sympathy gap. People from one sect or political group often discount or excuse casualties from another.

In Iraq, the Islamic State took root within an insurgency against the country’s Shiite-led government, and Shiite militias fighting it have been accused of brutality as well. In Syria, it is just one menace; many more Syrians have been killed by the government’s attacks on areas held by Sunni insurgents, including rebel groups opposed to the Islamic State.

Mr. Jiyad added that the Islamic State was “hoping to incite a reaction and a spiral into endless violence,” and that Iraqis played into that when they mourned more for their own sect than for others.

In the West, though, there is a tendency in certain quarters, legitimized by some politicians, to conflate extremist Islamist militants with the Muslim societies that are often their primary victims, or to dismiss Muslim countries as inherently violent.

“Either Iraqi blood is too cheap or murder is normalized,” Sayed Saleh Qazwini, an Islamic educator in Michigan, wrote on Twitter.

In Paris, a rainbow flag hangs on the Hotel de Ville, memorializing the 49 people gunned down at a gay nightclub in Orlando last month. But in a corner shop on Monday, the woman who served me had no such sympathy for the Middle East.

When she asked where I lived, and I told her Beirut, Lebanon, she exclaimed about the violence in the region. Struggling to explain that there is a lot more than just violence happening there, I said: “Yes, there are a lot of problems. What can one do?”

“Exterminer les islamistes,” she said grimly. Exterminate: a strong word. Islamists: a broad category of people.

Mr. Kilo, who spent years in the prisons of the Syrian government and opposes both it and the Islamic State, said his life in Paris had changed since November. Speaking Arabic is now suspect. He sees fear in French people’s eyes when they see Syrians.

“I’m afraid, too,” he said. “Someone could blow himself up anytime.”

He has written an article that will be published in the newspaper Al Araby Al Jadeed, titled “The Curse of Syria.”

The failure of empathy is broader than the Islamic State, he said; it extends to the international community’s unwillingness or inability to stop the slaughter of the Syrian civil war, which began with protests for political change.

“If we lose all humanity,” Mr. Kilo said, “if you allow the slaughter of a nation for five and a half years, after all the leaders of the international community declared the right of these people to revolt against their government, then expect Islamic State — and many other Islamic States in other forms and shapes.”

Follow Anne Barnard on Twitter @ABarnardNYT.

Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Paris, and Karen Zraick from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Muslims Stung by Indifference to Their Losses.

After Attacks on Muslims, Many Ask:
Where Is the Outpouring?,
NYT, July 5, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/
world/europe/muslims-baghdad-dhaka-istanbul-terror.html

Fighting ISIS as It Shifts Tactics

JULY 5, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Islamic State extended its bloody rampage with a suicide bombing in Baghdad on Sunday that killed more than 200 people, the deadliest attack on the city since the 2003 American-led invasion. On Monday, three smaller attacks on the Saudi Arabian cities of Jidda, Medina and Qatif were also linked to the terrorist group. The recent violence, including in Turkey and possibly in Bangladesh, may indicate some adjustment in the group’s tactics as its fortunes decline on the battlefields.

The multipronged assault reflects the Islamic State’s growing desperation as it loses the territory it seized in Iraq and Syria. An American-led coalition has recaptured 20 percent of the ISIS-held land in Syria and 47 percent in Iraq, including Falluja, which was taken back by Iraq’s beleaguered government last month.

After the Baghdad attack, the government’s response was not encouraging. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced plans to speed up the execution of ISIS members and some weak security measures. If Mr. Abadi cannot find ways to secure Baghdad, pressure may grow to move army units to the capital from the battlefield, where they are fighting ISIS. This would undercut plans by the American-led coalition, including the Iraqi Army, to intensify efforts to retake Mosul, a major city in the north that has been in ISIS’ hands for two years.

The latest attacks reveal an enemy that is adapting, becoming more sophisticated than Al Qaeda, and nurturing a far-flung network of operations, including in the West. A complex response is needed, but John Brennan, the Central Intelligence Agency director, said last month that “we still have a ways to go before we’re able to say that we have made some significant progress against them.”

Bombing isn’t the only recourse. Improved intelligence, coordinated operations to find terrorists before they strike and better strategies to counter extremist propaganda are equally needed. A central problem remains the tensions among countries in the region that have prevented a fully coordinated response to the Islamic State threat. The recent attack on Istanbul’s airport, which killed 44 people and authorities said was the work of ISIS, should persuade Turkey, a NATO member, to get more involved in the anti-ISIS fight, especially in Syria.

The Americans need to work more closely with Iran, the leading Shiite Muslim country, against the Islamic State in Iraq. Iran on Tuesday condemned the attacks against Saudi Arabia, its Sunni-majority rival, as well as those against Shiite Muslims, and called for a united response to terrorism. Testy relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia have also undercut a coherent regional response to the Islamic State, which wants to destabilize both governments. The risk is especially acute for Mr. Abadi, who has long struggled to hold on to power against challenges from other Shiite leaders. Sunday’s attack brought calls for his resignation from a population fed up with violence.

Experts say the Islamic State will wither as it loses more territory. But even then, it will no doubt continue to stage occasional attacks in Iraq and elsewhere. If Mr. Abadi and other Iraqi leaders are to protect their people, they will need the support of Iraq’s Sunni population, which remains marginalized and susceptible to Islamic State propaganda. That is a central political and security problem Iraq’s leaders have persistently failed to remedy.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on July 6, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Fighting ISIS as It Shifts Tactics.

Fighting ISIS as It Shifts Tactics,
NYT, July 5, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/
opinion/fighting-isis-as-it-shifts-tactics.html

Suicide Bombings

Hit 3 Cities in Saudi Arabia,

One Near a Holy Site

JULY 4, 2016

The New York Times

By BEN HUBBARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Bombings rocked three cities across Saudi Arabia on Monday, including near the Prophet’s Mosque in the holy city of Medina, raising the specter of increasingly coordinated attacks by militants seeking to destabilize the monarchy.

A suicide bomber struck near the United States Consulate in the coastal city of Jidda in the morning, wounding two security officers. Then, near dusk, when Muslims were ending their daily Ramadan fasts, other blasts struck near a Shiite mosque in the country’s east and at a security post in Medina, killing four guards, according to the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television network.

The blasts in Saudi Arabia followed a bloody week in which terrorist attacks caused mass casualties in the largest cities of three predominantly Muslim countries: Turkey, Bangladesh and Iraq.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in Baghdad, and it is suspected of carrying out the one in Istanbul.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the Saudi bombings, although Islamic State extremists have attacked the kingdom repeatedly in recent years, mostly targeting the Shiite minority and state security personnel.

The attacks occurred amid fears that extremists had planned further violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and for the holiday that celebrates its conclusion this week, Eid al-Fitr.

The Medina attack struck the security office of the mosque where the Prophet Muhammad is said to be buried, an important stop for millions of pilgrims who visit the holy cities each year. Four security officers died in the attack, Al Arabiya said, in addition to a suicide bomber.

The other evening attack was near a Shiite mosque in the eastern region of Qatif and killed no one but the bomber, according to witnesses quoted by the Reuters news agency.

The Jidda attack took place when security officers confronted a man acting suspiciously near the United States Consulate. He detonated his explosives, killing himself and wounding two guards, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.

The United States Embassy in Riyadh, the capital, said in a statement that none of its consular staff members in Jidda had been wounded, and it warned American citizens to limit nonessential travel to the kingdom and to remain cautious inside it.

An attack by Al Qaeda on the consulate in 2004 left five staff members and four gunmen dead.

In neighboring Kuwait, officials announced the arrest of four people accused of plotting two attacks in the country and said they had repatriated a Kuwaiti family who had joined the Islamic State in Syria, according to the state-run KUNA news agency.

One of the suspects is a young Kuwaiti man who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and was planning to bomb a mosque during Eid al-Fitr, the report said. The man said after his arrest that he had received instructions from an Islamic State operative abroad, the agency reported, to send a young recruit with no security record to obtain explosives and guns for the attack.

Two Kuwaitis and a man from an unspecified Asian country were arrested in the second plot and had two assault rifles, ammunition and the black flag of the Islamic State, the report said.

Kuwait also said it had arrested and repatriated a Kuwaiti man who had joined the Islamic State in Syria, as well as his mother and son. The man had studied petroleum engineering in Britain and had moved to Syria to work in oil production for the Islamic State after his older brother was killed while fighting for the group in Iraq, the report said.

Kuwait is predominantly Sunni, but Sunnis and Shiites live together with few sectarian tensions.

An Islamic State suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City killed 27 a year ago. The bomber was a Saudi citizen.

Follow Ben Hubbard on Twitter @NYTBen.

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2016,
on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Bombings Hit 3 Saudi Cities, Including One Near Holy Site.

Suicide Bombings Hit 3 Cities in Saudi Arabia, One Near a Holy Site,
NYT, July 4, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/world/middleeast/
saudi-arabia-us-consulate-kuwait.html

Horror and Sorrow in Dhaka

JULY 4, 2016

The New York Times

Tahmima Anam

When I was last in Dhaka, I used to take my son out in the car every afternoon. “Let’s go to Holey!” He would cry out from the back seat.

The Holey Artisan Bakery, just two years old, had become our firm favorite. The cakes were delicious, and it was the only place near home that had an open lawn. We took his mini-sized soccer ball with us, staying until dusk when the mosquitoes from the nearby lake drove us inside.

When the bakery first opened, it was just a counter with pastries and cakes. My husband and I sometimes joked we’d have to take out a mortgage to pay for the croissants — they were expensive — but the sunshine, the field, and the view of Gulshan Lake always lured us back.

As Holey became a popular family hangout, the owners built a pizza oven in the front, hired someone to make gelato and started serving tapas in the evenings.

On Friday, it was perhaps the tapas, or the pizza, or the open sky above the lawn that drew the dinner crowd, a mixture of Bangladeshis and foreigners. At about 8:45 in the evening, a group of heavily-armed men stormed and seized more than a score of diners as hostages.

The police arrived quickly, but when they attempted to enter the restaurant, they were met with heavy gunfire and grenades. Two officers were killed and many others were injured.

Over the course of the night, as the families of those inside held vigil on the street outside the restaurant, occasional gunshots could be heard. The militants singled out the foreigners for execution.

After nearly 12 hours of standoff, as dawn broke over the city, the army special forces finally succeeded in breaking the siege. Inside, they found the bodies of 20 victims and rescued at least 13 hostages. Among the dead, according to the police, were nine Italians, seven Japanese, an American, an Indian and two Bangladeshis.

Reports are still emerging about what exactly transpired. By some accounts, the gunmen assured the Bangladeshi hostages that they would be spared. Hostages were told to recite verses from the Quran in order to save themselves. According to an Indian newspaper, an Italian businessman who had stepped into the garden to make a phone call managed to hide in bushes and then escape — not knowing until later that his wife, trapped inside, had been murdered.

One victim’s story that stands out because of his courage was that of Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi who had gone out to dinner with two friends, Tarishi Jain and Abinta Kabir. Mr. Hossain and Ms. Kabir, an American citizen, were both students at Emory University, in Atlanta, on vacation; Ms. Jain, who was from India, was studying at Berkeley.

According to witnesses, when the militants heard that Mr. Hossain was Bangladeshi, they offered to release him, but he refused to leave his two friends behind. When the army broke through the terrorists’ barricade, they found the bodies of all three, with Mr. Hossain’s bearing marks of an intense struggle.

On Saturday morning, after the siege had ended and after many frantic calls and text messages exchanged with my family, we began to take stock of the carnage that had come to our capital. For those who lost loved ones, the loss is unimaginable and irreparable.

For the rest of us, the accounting means adjusting to a new and broken world. We know that our country and our city will never be the same again.

We know that the assurances of the authorities mean little. Given what just happened, last month’s police drive, which saw the arrests of more than 11,000 people supposedly in a crackdown on terrorism, merely exposes the government’s impotence in the face of these murderous militants. We may hope that the government will make peace with the opposition in order to tackle this darker threat, but we fear that this outrage in Dhaka will lead to more surveillance and exacerbate authoritarianism.

Further reports suggest that the assailants were not, as many expected to hear, from disenfranchised backgrounds. They were privately educated and from wealthy families — young men who easily might have been friends with some of the victims. Where does that leave us, knowing that these killers had every privilege in life and yet chose the path of nihilism?

It leaves us with this conclusion: We must accept that the story we have long told ourselves about our country may no longer be true. For months, I and many of my fellow Bangladeshis have wanted to believe that the targeted assassinations of writers, bloggers, publishers, gay rights activists, Hindu priests and foreign workers did not mean that Bangladesh was necessarily on a road to destabilization by violent extremists.

We felt sure that things must eventually go back to normal — normal being a Muslim-majority country with a secular Constitution and a robust tradition of social justice, diversity and pluralism. We did not believe Bangladesh could become one of those places where the wealthy barricade themselves behind high gates and private security, where embassies issue travel warnings and evacuate their staff, and where — God forbid — America sends its drones to target the militants.

Right now, all I care about is my city, about the innocent people who died in the café where my son learned to play soccer, about the three kids from my high school who met violent deaths beside the lake that was an oasis of calm in this bustling city.

Tomorrow, I may recover my sense of those truths about my country that I know to be fundamental. Today, I can only mourn what we have lost.

Tahmima Anam is the author, most recently, of the novel
“The Bones of Grace” and a contributing opinion writer.

Horror and Sorrow in Dhaka,
NYT, July 4, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/
opinion/horror-and-sorrow-in-dhaka.html

As ISIS Loses Land,

It Gains Ground in Overseas Terror

JULY 3, 2016

The New York Times

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — In just the past few days, the Islamic State’s evolving brand of terrorism has revealed its deadly, shifting faces.

In Istanbul last week, Turkish officials say, militants guided by the Islamic State conducted a coordinated suicide attack on the city’s main airport. In Bangladesh on Friday, a local extremist group that has pledged loyalty to the Islamic State butchered diners in a restaurant. And in Baghdad on Sunday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a bombing that killed more than 140 people.

The three deadly attacks are already being viewed by intelligence and law enforcement officials as proof that the Islamic State, the only terrorist group to create a state with borders, is becoming a larger, more sophisticated version of its stateless chief rival, Al Qaeda, as it loses territory under traditional military attack in Iraq and Syria.

Militant volunteers that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, began recruiting, training and sending to the West more than two years ago are now part of mature, clandestine networks, counterterrorism official say. The networks are increasingly responding to calls to accelerate attacks globally as the group suffers setbacks at home, like retreating from Falluja last month after an offensive by Iraqi forces supported by United States airstrikes and advisers.

“Attacks won’t fill any particular mold — some will be centrally planned, some will have some connection to ISIS, and some will be local option entirely,” said Andrew M. Liepman, a former deputy director at the National Counterterrorism Center who is now a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Combating this evolving, more complex array of threats — attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, attacks it directs from afar and those, as in Baghdad, that it carries out itself — demands more than just military strikes in Iraq and Syria, American officials acknowledge. Deterring, preventing and dealing with an expanding array of threats against far-flung and chiefly civilian targets is a growing priority for Western and other allied law enforcement and intelligence services.

“The emphasis is changing on this global terrorism campaign, and that introduces new vulnerabilities,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

In recent interviews, John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been unusually blunt about the slow nature of progress in the fight against the Islamic State outside Syria and Iraq, voicing fears that allied policy is not keeping up with an adaptive enemy.

“We still have a ways to go before we’re able to say that we have made some significant progress against them,” Mr. Brennan told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations here last week.

He warned that the trajectories for the ISIS religious state, or caliphate, and global violence point in opposite directions. “As the pressure mounts on ISIL,” he said, “we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”

In an audio message released May 21, the Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammed al-Adnani made clear that the organization would revert to its roots as a guerrilla insurgency, implicitly acknowledging that it would eventually lose its strongholds in Syria and Iraq and the very caliphate that has distinguished it from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Mr. Adnani, who also oversees the Islamic State’s external operations, repeated his call for supporters to attack the group’s enemies wherever and however possible.

The Islamic State operates clandestine terrorist cells in Britain, Germany and Italy, similar to the groups that carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said in April. Other intelligence officials said the Islamic State operated similar cells in Turkey, which were most likely involved in last week’s assault on the airport in Istanbul.

Some counterterrorism officials say the Islamic State’s lashing out may backfire. “ISIS wants to deter and divide its enemies with these attacks, but it usually ends up provoking them,” said Will McCants, a former State Department counterterrorism official now at the Brookings Institution. He said he anticipated that the attack in Istanbul would push Turkey to escalate its efforts against the Islamic State, just as the Paris attacks did for France.

Against this shifting adversary, President Obama has sought to strike an upbeat message. “We’ve seen that this continues to be a difficult fight, but we are making significant progress,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on June 14 after meeting with top national security advisers about combating the Islamic State. “This campaign at this stage is firing on all cylinders.”

Nearly two years into the American-led air war against the Islamic State, military officials say they have finally corrected the poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets that initially plagued the campaign, and are now hitting targets like oil rigs and secret cash coffers that finance the terrorist group’s war machine.

The American-led military campaign has slashed the group’s oil revenue in half, but it still generates $150 million a year. “That’s a lot of money,” said Col. Christopher Garver, a United States military spokesman in Iraq. “You can fund a lot of things across the globe.”

More than 1,200 people outside of Iraq and Syria have been killed in attacks inspired or coordinated by the Islamic State.
OPEN Graphic

As a result, the Islamic State has slashed fighters’ salaries in Raqqa, the group’s de facto headquarters in Syria, by up to 50 percent, American intelligence analysts say.

In testimony before a Senate committee on Tuesday, Brett McGurk, Mr. Obama’s special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, said the group had lost 47 percent of its territory in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria — territory used to extract oil from the ground and taxes from its residents, as well as to plot attacks against the West.

“The attraction of the Islamic State was the state,” Mr. Liepman of the RAND Corporation said. “The ideology lured people in, but the destination was more important: an idyllic Sunni land. When that goes away, I think much of the attraction of I.S. will go with it.”

Mr. Liepman warned, however, that even if the caliphate failed, hundreds if not thousands of battle-hardened soldiers would return home to continue the fight. “This will be the challenge for a generation, in Jordan and Tunisia, in France and the U.S.: how to deal with the combination of a back flow of fighters and radicalized citizens as well,” he said.

Tighter border controls have curbed the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq, but the Islamic State has diverted hundreds of others to its foreign enclaves, like Libya.

The Islamic State’s ranks in Iraq and Syria have fallen to between 18,000 and 22,000, from a peak of about 33,000 combatants last year, American officials say. But another 20,000 or so militants rally under the Islamic State banner in at least eight affiliates, including in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. By comparison, Al Qaeda at its peak had a couple of thousand fighters, Mr. Brennan said.

United States officials say they are ill equipped to thwart technologically savvy young Islamic State terrorists who use encrypted communications that Western experts find difficult to hack.

Even more worrisome, the propaganda and recruitment wars face steep hurdles. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a speech last week, shared a recent exchange with an African counterpart, who told him that violent extremists in the minister’s region were recruiting and proselytizing children as young as 5 years old.

“You know, they have a plan for 30 years or 35 years,” Mr. Kerry said his foreign counterpart had told him. “We don’t even have a five-year plan.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2016,
on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:
As ISIS Loses Land, Attacks Show It’s Gaining Ground
in Overseas Terror.

As ISIS Loses Land, It Gains Ground in Overseas Terror,
NYT, July 3, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/
world/middleeast/isis-terrorism.html

Bombing Kills

More Than 140 in Baghdad

JULY 3, 2016

The New York Times

By FALIH HASSAN,

TIM ARANGO

and OMAR AL-JAWOSHY

BAGHDAD — As celebrations for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan stretched past midnight into Sunday in central Baghdad, where Iraqis had gathered to eat, shop and just be together, a minivan packed with explosives blew up and killed at least 143 people — the third mass slaughter across three countries in less than a week.

The attack was the deadliest in Baghdad in years — at least since 2009 — and was among the worst Iraq has faced since the American invasion of 2003. The bombing came barely a week after Iraqi security forces, backed by American airstrikes, celebrated the liberation of Falluja from the Islamic State, which almost immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Even as fires still blazed Sunday morning at the bombing site, Iraq’s machinery of grief was fully in motion: Hospitals tried to identify charred bodies, workers sorted through the rubble searching for more victims, and the first coffins were on their way to the holy city of Najaf and its vast cemetery, always expanding, where Iraq’s Shiites bury their dead. By Sunday evening, a worker at the cemetery said more than 70 bodies had arrived, and many more were expected on Monday.

There were also immediate political repercussions, as the bombing brought an abrupt end to the brief victory lap that Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, was enjoying after the recapture of Falluja. Mr. Abadi rose to power in 2014, and the Obama administration had hoped that he could reunite the country after the divisive tenure of his immediate predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose sectarian policies were blamed for the rise of the Islamic State.

Less than two days earlier, two police officers and 20 hostages, many of them foreigners, were killed after gunmen invaded a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Islamic State claimed to be behind that attack. In Turkey, the authorities blamed the Islamic State for a coordinated suicide attack on Istanbul’s main airport that killed more than 40 people, although the terrorist group has not claimed responsibility.

Many of the victims in Baghdad on Sunday were children; the explosives detonated near a three-story complex of restaurants and stores where families were celebrating the end of the school year, residents said.

Ali Ahmed, 25, who owns a shop close to where the bomb went off, said that in the aftermath, knowing how many children were inside a shopping mall that was hit, he had begun yelling: “The kids upstairs! The kids upstairs! Save them!”

“But the firefighters arrived too late,” Mr. Ahmed said.

Later, he helped carry the bodies of children out of the rubble. He voiced anger at the security forces for failing to stop the bomber, and questioned why the street, which had been closed off earlier in the evening, was reopened around midnight.

When Mr. Abadi visited the bombing site on Sunday morning, people threw rocks and shoes at his convoy and yelled, “Thief!” The epithet was directed as much at Iraq’s dysfunctional and corrupt political class as it was at the prime minister.

“Thank God I managed to hit Abadi with stones to take revenge for the kids,” Mr. Ahmed said.

As those scenes unfolded and with anger swelling in the streets of the capital, many are now sure to wonder how long Mr. Abadi may remain in power; at the very least, the chaos is likely to presage the resumption of street unrest that had calmed during Ramadan and the military operations in Falluja.

The scenes that unfolded across the city on Sunday were another brutal illustration of the paradox Iraq faces as its security forces — and the American military, which is training the Iraqi Army and carrying out airstrikes and raids by Special Forces — make gains against the Islamic State. As more territory is won back, the group is reverting to its roots as a guerrilla insurgency, turning Baghdad again into an urban killing field.

Assaults like the one early on Sunday, as well as a string of attacks in Baghdad in May that killed more than 200 people in a week, make it difficult, if not impossible, for Mr. Abadi, a Shiite, to make meaningful progress in reconciling Iraq’s majority Shiites with Sunnis.

But the ferocity of the attack, and the ease in which the Islamic State is able to carry out mass murder in Baghdad, demonstrate another monumental challenge if the extremist group is driven from areas under its control: Not only will reconciliation be paramount, but any lasting peace will also require a lengthy counterinsurgency campaign that will challenge the Iraqi security forces and, perhaps, require a deepening involvement by United States forces.

After Mr. Abadi was forced to retreat with his bodyguards, he issued a statement saying that it was his “moral duty” to visit the site of terror attacks, and that he understood “the feelings and emotions and the actions of some people in their moment of sadness and anger.” He also declared three days of national mourning for the bombing victims.

He said the attacks were an attempt by the Islamic State to erase the jubilation many Iraqis felt about the liberation of Falluja. “I ask that God enable us to defeat terrorism and to protect our people, to have mercy on the martyrs and quickly heal the wounded, and to unite the Iraqis and crown their sacrifices with great victory,” he said.

The bombing occurred in the middle-class neighborhood of Karada, a busy district of cafes, shops and hotels, not to mention Mr. Abadi’s childhood home, as Iraqis joyously marked Eid al-Fitr, the days-long post-Ramadan festivity.

On Sunday afternoon, dozens of people were still unaccounted for. One man, Omar Adil, said two of his brothers, Ghaith and Mustafa, were missing. Five people from a single family in Sadr City, a poor Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, were also missing.

The Sunni extremists of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was the work of a suicide bomber and had killed a gathering of Shiite Muslims. But Karada is a mixed area where Iraqis of all identities gather to do ordinary things — mainly to shop and eat — and many Sunnis were killed, too.

Abdulkareem Hadi, a shop owner in Karada, said that late Saturday he had to go home briefly, and asked two of his friends to watch his store. On Sunday morning, he was mourning those friends, Saif and Abdullah, who both owned clothing stores near his.

“I could not recognize their bodies,” he said. “ISIS says, ‘We kill Shiites,’ but I lost my dearest friends to me in this explosion, and they were Sunnis.”

Officials said on Sunday night that the death toll in Baghdad stood at 143, and that at least 195 were wounded. But that tally may well grow in the days ahead, given that many people were still unaccounted for and that many of the wounded were in critical condition. Hospital officials, accustomed to the gory aftermath of terror attacks, were horrified, saying they had never seen so many charred bodies, and that many of them could not be identified.

Abdullabas Ameen, an Iraqi Navy officer from a rural area of southern Iraq, was a patient in one of the hospitals, with shrapnel wounds to his chest and thigh. He came to Baghdad for a military course, and said he had been in a great mood Saturday night, enjoying the cosmopolitanism of the capital, and shopping for Eid.

“Those feelings didn’t last for long,” he said. “Suddenly I felt an earthquake, and a huge explosion. I felt myself in the middle of smoke, fire, destruction and screaming.”

He said he had lost a colleague, and then railed against the government for failing to protect its citizens. “The government is completely responsible for this daily bloodshed,” he said.

In the weeks ahead, as Iraqis face soaring summer temperatures, a lack of electricity to power air-conditioners and growing anger over security lapses, many expect a return of street protests.

Beginning last summer, a street protest movement gathered steam, demanding that Mr. Abadi root out corruption, end the system of handing out government posts based on sect and improve services. He made several proposals but has been unable to make meaningful changes in the face of opposition from other political blocs worried about losing their influence.

The protest movement ebbed and flowed over months, and at various times different factions sought to capitalize on the growing fury of Iraq’s citizens. This year, the powerful Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who commands a following among millions of the country’s Shiite underclass, tried to seize the movement, and twice his followers stormed Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, the citadel of government.

But in their grief on Sunday, the political fallout was far from many Iraqis’ minds.

At the bombing site on Sunday, a woman, who had lost her husband and whose two sons were among the missing, was too grief-stricken to leave the scene.

All she could say was, “I don’t want to go to Najaf.”

Falih Hassan and Omar Al-Jawoshy reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from Beirut, Lebanon. An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf, Iraq.

A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
3rd Mass Attack in Days Leaves 143 Dead in Iraq.

Bombing Kills More Than 140 in Baghdad,
NYT, July 3, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/
world/middleeast/baghdad-bombings.html

After Slaughter,

Bangladesh Reels

at Revelations About Attackers

JULY 3, 2016

The New York Times

By JULFIKAR ALI MANIK

and GEETA ANAND

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Bangladesh’s capital city reeled in shock on Sunday as clues began to flood social media about the privileged backgrounds of the half-dozen attackers believed to have butchered 20 patrons of a restaurant during a bloody siege here late last week.

The six attackers were killed when the army stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery to end an 11-hour siege early Saturday.

The police declined to name the young men because nobody had shown up as of Sunday night to identify their bodies, but friends and relatives recognized photographs that were posted on a messaging app by the Islamic State, along with praise for the violence.

The men, all in their late teens or early 20s, were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad.

Among them was the son of a former city leader in the prime minister’s own Awami League, the governing party.

“That’s what we’re absolutely riveted by,” said Kazi Anis Ahmed, a writer and publisher of the daily newspaper The Dhaka Tribune. “That these kids from very affluent families with no material want can still be turned to this kind of ideology, motivated not just to the point of killing but also want to be killed.”

That children of the country’s upper classes appear to have joined militant Islamists in an act of such brutality highlighted the radicalization among the largely moderate Muslim population here, a process that has accelerated in recent years.

The attackers intended to kill foreigners, whom they shot and then hacked with sharp weapons, blaming them for hampering the progress of Islam, one of the hostages later said.

For more than three years now, Islamist militants have murdered atheist bloggers, members of religious minorities and others. The Islamic State and a regional branch of Al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for the killings, although the Bangladeshi government continues to insist that local groups were responsible.

The involvement of the Islamic State appeared increasingly more likely during the latest attack, with the organization not only claiming responsibility but later posting the photographs of the men believed to have carried it out.

Some of the rescued hostages remained in police custody on Sunday evening, including a Bangladeshi couple and their two school-aged children who witnessed the massacre, their relatives said.

The country was in the midst of a two-day mourning period declared by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, but in the homes of the young men who had been identified as the attackers on social media, families struggled with grief, shame and disbelief.

On Sunday, the police telephoned Meer Hayet Kabir, an executive with a foreign company in Dhaka, asking him to go to the military hospital morgue to identify a body that was possibly that of his 18-year-old son, Meer Saameh Mubasher.

He said he just could not bear to make the trip.

“How will we arrange a funeral for him in these circumstances?” he asked in an interview in his family’s apartment in a wealthy neighborhood close to the diplomatic district. “Who will come?”

“I will have to apologize to the whole world on behalf of my son,” he said.

Mr. Kabir had already been in close touch with the police since Mr. Mubasher disappeared on Feb 29.

The young man was a student at Scholastica School, one of the top private schools in Dhaka. He left home for a tutorial class, which he did not attend, and never returned.

Mr. Kabir said he had made the rounds of police and security officials in the capital since then, seeking help. He gave them a picture of his son, describing him as quiet and pious, someone who prayed five times a day and frequented the local mosque.

Mr. Kabir’s close relatives believe Mr. Mubasher was radicalized either by people he met at a mosque or in school. “I believe some Islamist group recruited my boy” and brainwashed him, Mr. Kabir said.

At least two other young men who appear in the photographs posted by the Islamic State had also attended the Scholastica School, a senior government official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation.

That official said that several of the men pictured had studied in Malaysia, at least one at Monash University, and that at least one other had studied at North South University, a private college in Dhaka where several others convicted in the hacking death of a blogger in 2013 were students.

The families of other attackers had also reported them missing, the official said.

Among them was a son of a former city Awami League official who disappeared at the end of December, said Biplob Kumar Das, deputy commissioner at the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.

Mr. Das said police officers searching for the young man, who was in his early 20s, had linked him with militant groups but had not been able to apprehend him. He confirmed that one of the photographs posted by the Islamic State resembled him.

Mr. Kabir said the family was unaware that Meer Saameh Mubasher was being radicalized, except, in retrospect, for one clue. The young man had liked to play the guitar, his father said, but about three months before his disappearance, he stopped.

When Mr. Kabir asked why, his son replied, “Music is not good,” reflecting an Islamist belief that music and dancing are bad influences.

Until now, he had hoped that Mr. Mubasher would reappear one day soon, like some others who disappear into Islamic groups for a time and then come back.

“How can I believe my kin who has humanitarian qualities can be part of these brutal killings?” he asked.

Gowher Rizvi, an adviser on foreign affairs to Ms. Hasina, said the police continued to believe that local groups were behind the militant attacks, and initial indications are that the restaurant siege was also orchestrated by homegrown militants.

Yet Mr. Rizvi said Bangladesh was also willing to consider whether international groups might be involved, although investigators had not seen evidence of external coordination in the Friday attack or the others of the past three years.

Mr. Kabir was steeling himself to make the dreaded trip to the morgue on Monday morning to confirm whether his son was among the dead attackers.

He had been staring at the pictures of the five young men in red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs, trying to convince himself that Mr. Mubasher was not among them.

While he recognized the chubby cheeks, wide nose and big smile in the picture, Mr. Kabir said, there was also something unfamiliar about it.

“I can tell you my boy was really a good humanitarian soul,” he said. “Such a soul cannot do something cruel like this.”

Follow Geeta Anand on Twitter @GOAnand.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Geeta Anand
from Mumbai, India.

A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2016,
on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Attackers Linked to Bangladesh Restaurant Slaughter
Had Privileged Lives.

After Slaughter, Bangladesh Reels at Revelations About Attackers,
NYT, July 3, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/
world/asia/bangladesh-dhaka-terrorism.html

Appealing to Its Base,

ISIS Tempers Its Violence

in Muslim Countries

JULY 2, 2016

The New York Times

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

The first to be killed was a jogger, gunned down last September during his daily run in the leafy diplomatic quarter of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. He was identified as a 50-year-old Italian aid worker, and the police say the men who murdered him had been given instructions to kill a white foreigner at random.

In October, a Japanese man was killed. In November, gunmen riding a motorcycle pulled alongside a Catholic priest in northern Bangladesh and opened fire, wounding him.

For the Islamic State terrorist group, which broadly advised operatives it sent to Europe to kill “anyone and everyone,” the group’s tactics in Bangladesh have seemed more controlled. In the past nine months, it has claimed 19 attacks in the South Asian country, nearly all of them targeted assassinations singling out religious minorities and foreigners. They included hacking to death a Hindu man, stabbing to death a Shiite preacher, murdering a Muslim villager who had been accused of converting to Christianity and sending suicide bombers into Shiite mosques.

For years, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, has pursued a campaign of wholesale slaughter in Syria and Iraq. And in the attacks the group has directed or indirectly inspired in Western countries — including the coordinated killings in Paris and Brussels and the mass shooting inside an Orlando, Fla., nightclub — the assailants killed at random.

But a closer look at the attack the Islamic State has claimed in Bangladesh — and at the fact that it has not claimed bombings attributed to it in Turkey, including the airport attack this past week — suggests a group that is tailoring its approach for different regions and for different target audiences.

“For I.S. to maintain support among its followers and prospects, it must take different considerations into account when planning an attack in a Muslim country versus non-Muslim countries,” argues Rita Katz, the director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which has tracked the group’s attacks in Bangladesh. “I.S. encourages the killing of random civilians in France, Belgium, America or other Western nations, but in a country like Turkey, I.S. must be sure that it isn’t killing Muslims — or at least make it look like it’s trying not to,” she wrote in an analysis recently published online.

The issue of killing Sunni civilians has been a main point of contention with Al Qaeda after the Islamic State broke away from the terror network several years ago. And it surfaced again in the past week.

After the triple suicide bombing at the Istanbul airport on Tuesday, a Qaeda official used Twitter to issue a stinging rebuke of the attack blamed on ISIS. “The Turkish people are Muslims, & their blood is sacred. A true mujahid would give his life up for them, not massacre them #IstanbulAttack,” wrote Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir, who has been described as an Australian member of Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, according to a transcript provided by SITE.

The Islamic State’s uncharacteristic silence about the attacks in Turkey, when it tends to quickly claim bombings elsewhere, reflects the balancing act the terror group must undertake when carrying out violence in predominantly Muslim nations, analysts say.

Ms. Katz said the Islamic State “has shown comparable discretion when conducting attacks in other Muslim countries, focusing on government targets, perceived religious deviants and enemy factions, as opposed to random civilians.”

For example, when the terror group last month claimed its first bombing in Jordan, it made sure to identify its target as an American-Jordanian military base. In May, the Islamic State carried out a bombing on a Shiite mosque in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia. And in January, when it struck in Jakarta, Indonesia, the group took pains to frame the attack as one against tourists, not locals, Ms. Katz wrote.

That kind of hedging is more typical of Al Qaeda, which has called on its fighters to avoid operations that would cause mass casualties among Muslim civilians.

In reality, though, Al Qaeda, like ISIS, continues to kill large numbers of Muslims in its attacks. But that has not stopped the two groups from arguing about it.

The disagreement dates back to at least 2005, when the then-No. 2 of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, wrote a letter of complaint to the head of the group’s affiliate in Iraq, chastising him for repeated attacks on Shiite shrines, which the Qaeda leadership feared would turn the population against them. The recipient of that letter was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who carried out the strikes anyway. His jihadist branch, Al Qaeda in Iraq, would years later re-emerge as the Islamic State.

In the years since the letter to Mr. Zarqawi, Al Qaeda went further. In one speech, Mr. Zawahri advised Qaeda fighters across the world to avoid killing religious minorities, including Christians, and to design operations that minimized Muslim casualties.

In 2013, when Al Qaeda loyalists stormed a BP-operated gas plant in southern Algeria, they separated their hostages by faith, releasing hundreds of Muslim workers while holding and killing the plant’s Western employees, a fact they touted in an after-action report sent to a senior Qaeda leader.

These tactics were far from perfect: Muslims still died in the Algeria attack, and in numerous others by Al Qaeda, including in their siege that same year at a mall in Kenya, where they asked shoppers to recite Quranic scripture in an effort to separate Muslims from non-Muslims.

“It’s a very stark difference in approach,” says Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who studies jihadist groups. “Al Qaeda wants Muslims to believe that its terrorism is morally justifiable, whereas the Islamic State argues that only its followers have moral legitimacy.”

In the most recent attack attributed to the Islamic State, on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Bangladesh’s diplomatic quarter, the attackers were more selective about their target than the Islamic State tends to be.

The bakery is in what expatriates affectionately call the “Tri-State” area of Dhaka, referring to the intersection of three exclusive neighborhoods — Gulshan I, Baridhara and Banani — that are popular with foreigners, said Lori Ann Walsh Imdad, a 45-year-old United States citizen who lives a block and a half from the scene of Friday’s standoff. “When you walked by, you would always see someone you recognized,” she said, adding that it was founded to provide expatriates with the comfort foods they missed, including American-style bagels and cream cheese.

On Saturday, the Islamic State released images of the attackers, describing them as having “charged into the middle of the gathering of nationals from Crusader nations in Bangladesh.” While the casualty breakdown is not yet known and it is unclear how many Muslims were killed in the attack, the group’s description suggested it was eager to pass off the slaughter as aimed exclusively at non-Muslims.

Accounts from witnesses said that some of the attackers sought to calm their hostages, calling for Bengalis to come out from hiding and explaining they were only seeking foreigners to kill. Hours later, the gunmen released a group of women who wore hijabs.

Though ISIS may have been trying to signal restraint with its attacks in Bangladesh, their tactics are still less targeted than those of Al Qaeda, said Amarnath Amarasingham, a fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

Al Qaeda’s branch in the Indian subcontinent has focused on killing those they claim have insulted Islam, including secular bloggers.

For his research, Mr. Amarasingham interviewed a man he said was a member of Al Qaeda’s branch in the region who derisively compared the group’s handiwork to that of ISIS. “AQ is targeting the best from the best. but isis guys killing in jungle, in village, innocent hindu old guy etc, just to increase the number of claim,” read one private message from the Qaeda member that was shared by Mr. Amarasingham.

Reporting was contributed by Liam Stack from New York, Julfikar Ali Manik and Maher Sattar from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Rami Nazzal from Ramallah, West Bank.

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2016,
on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Appealing to Its Base, ISIS Tempers Its Violence in Muslim Countries.

Appealing to Its Base, ISIS Tempers Its Violence in Muslim Countries,
NYT, July 2, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/
world/middleeast/isis-muslim-countries-bangladesh.html

Bangladesh Attack Is New Evidence

That ISIS Has Shifted Its Focus

Beyond the Mideast

JULY 2, 2016

The New York Times

By JULFIKAR ALI MANIK,

GEETA ANAND

and ELLEN BARRY

DHAKA, Bangladesh — The cook was crouching in a washroom, taking refuge from the gunmen who had invaded the Holey Artisan Bakery, when he understood that there was a logic behind the killing: The people in the restaurant were being sorted.

“Bengali people, come out,” one gunman shouted. When the cook, Sumir Barai, and eight other men opened the bathroom door, trembling, they saw two young men, clean shaven and dressed in jeans and T-shirts.

“You don’t need to be so tense,” one of the men told them. “We will not kill Bengalis. We will only kill foreigners.” At that, Mr. Barai’s gaze flicked to the floor of the restaurant, where he could see six or seven bodies, apparently shot and then sliced with machetes. All appeared to be foreigners.

The gunmen, he said, seemed eager to see their actions amplified on social media: After killing the patrons, they asked the staff to turn on the restaurant’s wireless network. Then they used customers’ telephones to post images of the bodies on the internet.

Friday night’s assault on the Holey Artisan Bakery in the diplomatic district of Dhaka, in which at least 20 hostages and two police officers were killed, marks a scaling up of ambition and capacity for Bangladesh’s Islamist militancy, which has until now carried out pinpoint assassinations, mostly of critics of Islam and members of religious minorities.

Among the dead from Friday’s attack, the police said, were nine Italians, seven Japanese, two Bangladeshis, one American and one Indian.

The attack also suggests that Bangladesh’s militant networks are internationalizing, a key concern as the United States seeks to contain the growth of the Islamic State.

Bangladesh’s 160 million people are almost all Sunni Muslims, including a demographic bulge under the age of 25. This makes it valuable as a recruiting ground for the Islamic State, now under pressure in its core territory of Iraq and Syria. Western intelligence officials have been watching the organization pivot to missions elsewhere in the world, launching attacks on far-flung civilian targets that are difficult to deter with traditional military campaigns.

“We need to take serious stock of the overall threat,” said Shafqat Munir, a research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “There were all sorts of warnings and signs and everything. But I don’t think anyone expected anything as audacious and large-scale as this.”

It was a slow night at the restaurant. Eighteen people had reserved seats at the Holey Artisan Bakery, whose crusty flour-dusted loaves of bread and piles of homemade pasta offered a respite from the sticky, clamorous city that surrounded it.

Seven Italian friends had gathered around one table, and three or four at a second, recalled Diego Rossini, a chef who is from Argentina. Someone had just ordered an Italian pasta dish, and Mr. Rossini made his way to the kitchen, preparing for a much larger crowd that was expected at 9:30 p.m.

But at 8:45, a half-dozen young men entered, carrying heavy bags of weaponry, including grenades and long rifles. Mr. Rossini, the chef, fled to the roof. He heard screams, and shouts of “Allahu akbar,” as the gunmen sought out patrons who were hiding.

“There were a lot of foreigners,” he told Canal 5 Noticias, an Argentine cable news station. “That’s who they were particularly looking for.”

Even as they killed the foreigners, the attackers were unfailingly polite and solicitous with the restaurant staff and other Bangladeshis, Mr. Barai said.

They took the staff into their confidence, complaining that foreigners, with their skimpy clothes and taste for alcohol, were impeding the spread of Islam. “Their lifestyle is encouraging local people to do the same thing,” a militant said.
Bangladesh

They asked the staff to make coffee and tea and serve it to the remaining hostages. At 3:30 a.m., when Muslims eat a predawn meal before fasting, they asked the kitchen staff to prepare and serve dishes of fish and shrimp, he said.

Mr. Barai recalls being puzzled by the attackers, who spoke cosmopolitan Bengali, and even some English, when conversing with the foreigners.

“They were all smart and handsome and educated,” he said. “If you look at those guys, nobody could believe they could do this.” In the predawn hours, the militants lectured their captives on religious practices, instructing the kitchen staff to say regular prayers and study the Quran.

Early in the morning, the gunmen released a group of women wearing hijabs and offered a young Bangladeshi man, Faraz Hossain, the opportunity to leave, too, said Hishaam Hossain, Mr. Hossain’s nephew, who had heard an account from the hostages who were freed.

Mr. Hossain, a student at Emory University, was accompanied by two women wearing Western clothes, however, and when the gunmen asked the women where they were from, they said India and the United States. The gunmen refused to release them, and Mr. Hossain refused to leave them behind, his relative said. He would be among those found dead on Saturday morning.

In the hours after the gunmen appeared, hundreds of police officers massed outside the restaurant compound’s walls, but an attempted raid was repulsed by a grenade, killing two officers and injuring more than 20. Mr. Rossini, who was on the roof, frantically texted his location over social media.

“It was practically impossible for the police to get in,” he said later. The restaurant was like a little fort, and the police had to wait for the army.

A senior police official, speaking to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, said that the police tried unsuccessfully to establish contact with the captors, who never passed on any demands.

The night crept on with painful slowness in the crowded washroom, where Mr. Barai and the eight other men were again locked in, this time by the gunmen. At 1:44 a.m. Mr. Barai messaged a cousin, who was only a few yards away, outside the police cordon.

“What is the news on the outside?” His cousin typed back that a Rapid Action Battalion, Bangladesh’s elite counterterrorism squad, was now involved in the operation. “They are not doing anything right now so you people don’t become victims,” he wrote.

Mr. Barai passed on the name of a co-worker who could lead authorities to the washroom. “We are here,” he typed. “If possible break the wall of the toilet and rescue us.”

As dawn approached, Mr. Barai feared that the men would suffocate in the cubicle, which measures about four feet by four feet. “Please come to the toilet quickly as it is very difficult inside the toilet.”

After that, when Mr. Barai’s cousin called his number, there was no answer; the cousin, seated on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, began to sob.

In an early-morning meeting at her residence, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had authorized a military raid, but that required transporting a team of commandos via C-130 from Sylhet, roughly 150 miles from the capital.

Shortly after sunrise, dozens of armed personnel carriers formed columns in the lanes around the restaurant.

Mr. Barai said the surviving hostages sensed that the siege was ending. During the long hours that passed inside the restaurant, the gunmen made it clear that they expected to die, Mr. Barai said. One of them calmly said as much. “You see what we did here,” the militant said, pointing to the bodies around. “The same thing is going to happen to us now.”

At 7:30 a.m., he said, the militants told them: “We are leaving. See you in heaven.”

They were getting ready to walk out the door, he said, when the commandos stormed the restaurant.

Correction: July 2, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a cook at the restaurant who hid in a washroom with eight other men. He is Sumir Barai, not Soumir Roy.
Correction: July 2, 2016

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the reporting credit with this article misstated the location of one of the reporters. Geeta Anand reported from Mumbai, not New Delhi.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, Geeta Anand from Mumbai, and Ellen Barry from New Hampshire. Reporting was contributed by Russell Goldman from New York, Rukmini Callimachi from Paris, Gaia Pianigiani from Rome, Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong, Eric Schmitt from Washington, Jonathan Soble from Tokyo, and Maher Sattar from Dhaka.

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Slaughter in Bangladesh as ISIS Broadens Reach.

Bangladesh Attack Is New Evidence That ISIS
Has Shifted Its Focus Beyond the Mideast,
NYT, July 2, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/asia/bangladesh-
hostage-standoff.html

Taliban Attack

on Afghan Police Cadets

Kills at Least 33

JUNE 30, 2016

The New York Times

By KAREEM FAHIM

and MOHAMAD FAHIM ABED

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents bombed a convoy of buses carrying police cadets on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Thursday, killing at least 33 people, including four civilians, according to government officials and the United Nations.

During a year of surging violence across Afghanistan, the government and its foreign allies have failed to coax the Taliban into participating in peace talks, or even into agreeing on a cease-fire that would have lasted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which will end next week.

The bombings were the second large-scale assault by the Taliban in Kabul in less than two weeks. On June 20, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives next to a minibus shuttling Nepalese and Indian security guards to work at the Canadian Embassy, in one of the deadliest attacks on foreign contractors in the capital.

On Thursday, the insurgents appeared to have employed a familiar attack strategy intended to maximize casualties as well as show the reach of the Taliban even in well-secured cities like the capital.

The police convoy, which carried 215 cadets in five buses, was first hit by a car bomb that destroyed two of the buses, according to Mohamed Musa Rahmati, the governor of the district where the attack occurred. A short while later, a suicide bomber detonated explosives on his body as passengers on other buses came to the aid of the injured, according to a statement by the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The cadets had recently graduated from a police academy in Wardak Province, west of the capital, and were traveling to Kabul for their first assignments, Mr. Rahmati said.

After the explosions, relatives conducted frantic and sometimes futile searches of the city’s hospitals. Noryalay Yaqoubi found an injured brother at Emergency, a trauma hospital in the city, but was still missing a family member. “We cannot find our uncle,” he said. “We searched everywhere and he was nowhere. We think he is dead, and maybe they took him to a military hospital.”

Outside the hospital were family members angry that officials had not provided more help. “What kind of government is this?” said Amin, 52, who uses just one name. He was searching for a nephew. “We are not able to find our relatives, dead or alive. We are serving this government, but no one is helping us.”

Inside the hospital, Mohamed Jawed, a cadet who suffered head injuries, struggled to describe how he had survived. After the first, “very strong” explosion, he managed to get off the bus, and heard the second blast. Mr. Jawed, who said he was a refugee in Iran until he attended the police academy two months ago, took a taxi to the hospital on Thursday.

The recent attacks in the capital, both on buses, have raised questions about safety measures for the transport of security personnel, who are frequently targeted by insurgents. The Nepalese and Indian security contractors killed last week were traveling in an ordinary minibus, rather than the armored vehicles that many Western security contractors use.

The police cadets were even more visible as they traveled toward Kabul in large green school buses. In a statement after the bombing, President Ashraf Ghani called for an investigation into the decision to use a convoy of buses.

Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 1, 2016,
on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline:
Taliban Attack on Police Cadets Kills at Least 33.

Taliban Attack on Afghan Police Cadets Kills at Least 33,
NYT,
June 30, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/
world/asia/taliban-afghanistan-police-convoy-bombings.html

Istanbul Airport Attack

Leaves at Least 41 Dead

JUNE 28, 2016

The New York Times

By TIM ARANGO,

SABRINA TAVERNISE

and CEYLAN YEGINSU

ISTANBUL — Three suicide attackers killed at least 41 people and wounded dozens more at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday night, in the latest in a string of terrorist attacks in Turkey, a NATO ally once seen as a bastion of stability but now increasingly consumed by the chaos of the Middle East.

Hours after the assault, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim of Turkey said that early indications pointed to an operation carried out by the Islamic State, but as of early Wednesday, the group had not claimed responsibility for the attack.

The attack began shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday, Turkish officials said, when two gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at a security checkpoint outside Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, one of Europe’s busiest. They then detonated their explosives, setting off two fireballs. A third attacker set off explosives in the parking lot.

Turkey has faced a string of terrorist attacks over the past year, including several in Istanbul, as it confronts threats from both the Islamic State and Kurdish militants fighting a war with the Turkish state in the southeast.

The Istanbul governor’s office said on Wednesday morning that 41 people had died. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Tuesday that 147 people were wounded.

Most of the dead were Turks, although some were foreigners, Mr. Yildirim said. The three attackers were killed when they detonated their explosives, he said.

Outside the terminal on Tuesday night, as calls went out on local news channels for blood donors and the Turkish authorities imposed a ban on publishing images of the scene of the attack, ambulances streamed in, while hundreds of dazed and scared travelers sat on the sidewalk waiting for information. And more travelers, many in tears, were streaming out of the airport.

“There were blood splatters everywhere,” said Eylul Kaya, 37, sitting outside with her 1-year-old son. “I covered my boy’s eyes and we ran out.”

As Turkey has faced several deadly terrorist attacks over the past year, Ms. Kaya said, she never thought she would find herself in the middle of one. “We’ve watched these attacks on TV for months, but I never imagined it would happen with so much security in an airport,” she said.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan noted that the bombing came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and he called for global unity in the fight against terrorism.

“Despite paying a heavy price, Turkey has the power, determination and capacity to continue the fight against terrorism until the end,” Mr. Erdogan said in a statement.

Mr. Erdogan added: “The bombs that exploded in Istanbul today could have gone off at any airport in any city around the world. Make no mistake: For terrorist organizations, there is no difference between Istanbul and London, Ankara and Berlin, Izmir and Chicago, or Antalya and Rome.”

Turkey has held itself up as an exemplar of a Muslim democracy and has sought to influence the region by reaching out to its Muslim neighbors. Early on, when Syria slipped into civil war in 2011, Turkey pushed for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad and began helping Syrian rebel groups, allowing the transit of fighters and weapons across its territory.

Turkey’s Western allies, including the United States, blamed the country’s open-border policy for allowing extremist groups like the Islamic State to become powerful inside Syria, and the chaos has increasingly spilled over into Turkey, with terrorist attacks and waves of refugees.

Turkey, a NATO member, has often been at odds with its Western allies over its approach to the region. The United States and others believe that Turkey’s early policy on Syria enabled the growth of the Islamic State, and they have long felt that Turkey was a reluctant partner in fighting the terrorist group. Turkey, in turn, has grown angry over American support for Syrian Kurdish rebels that it sees as terrorists because of links to Kurdish militants inside Turkey.

Some of the recent terrorist attacks in Turkey — including a car bombing in Ankara, the capital, in February — have been attributed to Kurdish militants, which has heightened tensions between Ankara and Washington over the support the United States has given to Syrian Kurdish militants fighting the Islamic State.

The attack on Tuesday evoked the bombing of the Brussels airport several months ago and highlighted the conundrum security officials face in minimizing casualties from terrorist attacks. In Brussels, the attackers managed to get inside the terminal and detonate their explosives. But at the Istanbul airport, the first security check is in a vestibule at the entrance to the terminal, which theoretically adds a layer of security. But even so, people have to line up there and, as the attack demonstrated, it is an easy target for terrorists.

Judith Favish, a South African who was heading home, said she was at the counter checking in for her flight when she heard gunfire and then an explosion.

“So I jumped across and hid under the counter and then someone told us to run, so I ran and hid in a cafeteria,” she said, standing outside the terminal. “We waited there for an hour and then we were told to get out, but no one has given us any information. I have no clothes, phone, money, nothing. Haven’t called my family. No one is telling me anything.”

She paused, and then said that she had seen blood everywhere near the entranceway.

Flights out of Istanbul were immediately canceled Tuesday night, and ones on their way were diverted. The airport, the third busiest in Europe and the 11th busiest in the world, was closed after the attack, but Mr. Yildirim, the prime minister, said early Wednesday that it had reopened. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights between the United States and Ataturk airport after the attack, but lifted the order late Tuesday.

Although no group claimed responsibility for the attack, initial speculation centered on Turkey’s two main enemies: the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and Kurdish militants linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has waged war with Turkey for more than three decades. Last year, peace talks with the P.K.K. broke down, and the two sides have been at war since. But hours after the attack, Turkish officials turned their attention toward the Islamic State.

“The terrorists arrived at the airport in a taxi,” Mr. Yildirim said. “We will share more details about the attack later. There was no security lapse at the airport.”

Turkey has been rocked by a series of bombings since 2014, and the attacks have been increasing in frequency. In some cases, Kurdish militants have claimed responsibility, but in others, including ones this year in Istanbul’s old city and on its main pedestrian boulevard, Turkish officials have blamed the Islamic State.

Michael S. Smith II, an analyst who closely tracks the Islamic State’s propaganda online, said on Tuesday that there had been a noticeable uptick in the group’s statements regarding Turkey, especially after the announcement last year that the United States had gained access to the Incirlik Air Base.

“Official claims of responsibility for most attacks the Islamic State has been accused of executing in Turkey have been notable by their absence,” Mr. Smith said in an email. “However, during the past year, a significant increase in focus on the Erdogan government’s policies within Islamic State propaganda has been used to build expectations the group will expand its terrorism operations into Turkey.”
Turkey

Almost immediately after the attack on Tuesday, there was speculation that it might have been a response by the Islamic State to the recent reconciliation between Turkey and Israel, which announced a wide-ranging deal this week to restore diplomatic relations. The two countries had been estranged for six years, after an episode in 2010 in which Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli blockade; several Turkish activists were killed.

Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish columnist, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday evening, “The fact that the attack came right after the Turkish-Israeli deal might be not an accident — if ISIS is that fast in response.”

Other analysts, though, noted that attacks involving multiple suicide bombers take time to prepare and are not typically attempted on very short notice.

“Unfortunately, we see the side effects of a disastrous Syria policy that has brought terrorism into the heart of Istanbul and Ankara,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, a former lawmaker who is now chairman of the Center for Strategic Communication, a research organization, in Ankara. “This is obviously intended to create an atmosphere of chaos and hit the economy and tourism.”

When the attack happened, Asli Aydintasbas, an analyst and writer on Turkish affairs, was on a plane bound for Istanbul but was rerouted to Ankara, where the airport was filled with stranded and confused tourists, double-checking with airport workers that they had in fact landed elsewhere.

“Our world is turned upside down,” said Ms. Aydintasbas, who has chronicled Turkey’s descent in to chaos in recent years in her columns.

Referring to Istanbul, and the stature it attained in recent years as a global tourist destination, she said: “It was a happening town, cutting edge in arts and culture. It’s the kind of place that Condé Nast would write about. Now this is a Middle Eastern country where these things happen.”

Correction: June 28, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of dead, using information from The Associated Press. At the time the article was posted, the authorities said that at least 36 people had been killed, not 50. The same error appeared in the headline.

Correction: June 29, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the American university that the sister of Ahmet Samanci, a graduate student, attends. It is the University at Buffalo, not the University of Buffalo.

Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul, Rukmini Callimachi from Paris, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Dozens Left Dead as Attackers Hit Istanbul Airport.

Istanbul Airport Attack Leaves at Least 41 Dead,
NYT,
June 28, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/
world/europe/turkey-istanbul-airport-explosions.html

The Broken Promise

of Closing Guantánamo

JUNE 20, 2016

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

Eight years ago, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama agreed on one issue: It was time to shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Asked about his position on Guantánamo, Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, said his view had been reinforced by meeting an operative of Al Qaeda held prisoner in Iraq, who told him the use of torture by American forces helped to fuel the insurgency.

“What is the moral superiority of the United States of America if we torture prisoners?” Mr. McCain said shortly before the election. Mr. Obama vowed to shut down the prison during his first year in office, calling it a legal and moral abomination.

As Mr. Obama’s administration draws to a close, there is less and less hope that the president will find a way to fulfill his promise.

The failure to close Guantánamo, where 80 detainees remain, is a shameful stain on Congress, which has hindered efforts to release prisoners and barred the Pentagon from moving those remaining to prisons in the United States. The prison has undermined America’s standing as a champion of human rights and set a deplorable example for other governments inclined to violate international human rights law. Its familiar orange jumpsuits have been made part of the terrorists’ propaganda, most recently by Islamic State fighters in photos and videos that show the execution of hostages.

There is a modest step still available to Mr. Obama to demonstrate to the world that he is willing to acknowledge what has taken place at Guantánamo. The United Nations special rapporteur who examines issues of torture has sought access to the detainees for years, seeking to document their treatment while in custody. The government has refused repeated requests since 2004, with no good reason.

“I want to believe that the use of torture by the United States is a dark chapter that has ended,” Juan Méndez, the special rapporteur, said in an interview. “But I can’t be certain of that until we see a change in policy and verify that the United States is meeting all its international obligations.”

The defense team of Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the detainees at Guantánamo who is being tried in connection with the 9/11 attacks, filed a motion in May asking the military commission to allow him to meet with Mr. Méndez. Thomas Pickering, a veteran diplomat who has served as ambassador to Russia, India and the United Nations in Republican and Democratic administrations, has filed a memorandum supporting this request. Mr. Pickering wrote that recent reports of “heavy-handed and even brutal force-feedings, indifferent medical care, unacceptably cold stainless steel cells, indefinite solitary confinement” at Guantánamo may constitute violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture. The United States is a signatory of both.

“Guantánamo is currently used by our enemies as a symbol of lawlessness that grossly undermines U.S. national security,” Mr. Pickering wrote. “If the public reports about current abusive conditions are false, then I believe that the United States has much to gain by allowing” Mr. Méndez access.

Mr. Obama’s pledge to close the prison was doomed by Republican opposition. But it is not too late for him to allow independent human rights monitors to create a fuller historical record of the conduct of the American government after 9/11.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 20, 2016,
on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Broken Promise on Guantánamo.

The Broken Promise of Closing Guantánamo,
NYT,
June 20, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/
opinion/the-broken-promise-of-closing-guantanamo.html

Omar Mateen,

an ‘Americanized Guy,’

Shows Threat

of Lone Terrorists

JUNE 13, 2016

The New York Times

By MARK MAZZETTI,

ERIC LICHTBLAU

and ALAN BLINDER

WASHINGTON — When a young American man from coastal Florida drove a truck packed with explosives into a hilltop restaurant in Syria in May 2014, F.B.I. agents scoured his online postings and interviewed his contacts in Florida in a scramble to determine who, if anyone, might try to launch a similar attack inside the United States.

One of the people they spoke to was Omar Mateen, a young security guard from a nearby town who had attended the same mosque as the suicide bomber and had been on a terrorism watch list for incendiary comments he once made to co-workers at a local courthouse. But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community.

That hopeful conclusion was upended in a bloody spasm of violence early Sunday morning when Mr. Mateen fatally shot dozens of people at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., before being killed by police officers who stormed the club to end the standoff. The horrific events at the Pulse nightclub left 49 dead and have left family members, neighbors and federal investigators trying to piece together clues about what might have led Mr. Mateen, 29, to carry out such unspeakable violence.

The government investigation could take months, but an early examination of Mr. Mateen’s life reveals a hatred of gay people and a stew of contradictions. He was a man who could be charming, loved Afghan music and enjoyed dancing, but he was also violently abusive. Family members said he was not overly religious, but he was rigid and conservative in his view that his wife should remain mostly at home. The F.B.I. director said on Monday that Mr. Mateen had once claimed ties to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah — two radical groups violently opposed to each other.

Investigators now face the question of how much the killings were the act of a deeply disturbed man, as his former wife and others described him, and how much he was driven by religious or political ideology. Whatever drove him to carry out the shootings, his actions highlight the difficulty for the American government in trying to address a new style of terrorism — random acts of violence that may have been at least partly inspired by the Islamic State but were not directed by the group’s leaders.

Unlike Al Qaeda, which favors highly organized and planned operations, the Islamic State has encouraged anyone to take up arms in its name, and uses a sophisticated campaign of social media to inspire future attacks by unstable individuals with little history of embracing radical Islam. President Obama said Monday that there was no evidence that the Islamic State actually directed Sunday’s attack, which would make Mr. Mateen’s case part of a pattern of domestic radicalization.

American officials have said that those under surveillance in the United States for possible ties to the group usually have little terrorism expertise or outside support, which makes thwarting an Islamic State-inspired attack less like stopping a traditional act of terrorism and more like trying to prevent a shooting at a school or movie theater.

The son of Afghan immigrants, Mr. Mateen was born in New York in 1986, moved to Florida with his family in 1991 and spent his early years there in the Port St. Lucie area near the state’s east coast. He made friends as a child at a local mosque, and built friendships during slumber parties and basketball games, and playing video games. He bounced between jobs in high school and college. In court documents connected to a 2006 name change — from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar Mir Seddique Mateen — he said he had held eight jobs in about four years, including work as a grocer and as a salesman at a computer store.

He earned an associate degree in criminal justice technology from Indian River State College in 2006, the year he began working for the Florida Department of Corrections at a facility just west of Port St. Lucie.

He left that job six months later, and within six months he had found work with G4S, a large private security company that has won large government contracts for work both in the United States and abroad. He was assigned to protect at least two properties during his years at the firm: PGA Village, a golf club, and the St. Lucie County Courthouse complex.

Mr. Mateen had a home in Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast. On Monday morning, a reporter told the police that the house’s sliding glass back door was open. Officers went to the home and “discovered the door open, possibly by force, creating suspicion of a burglary,” a police spokesman said. “Detectives will follow up to determine if, in fact, it was a burglary.”

Mr. Mateen met his future wife, Sitora Yusufiy, on MySpace in 2008. Both were on the site looking for love and eventually marriage, and she was drawn to him because of his alluring and funny messages.

During an interview Monday at her home in Boulder, Colo., Ms. Yusufiy said he seemed perfect — American enough for her free spirit and Muslim enough to please her traditional family.

“This man was a simple, Americanized guy that was also from my culture. And, you know, had the same religion,” she said. “So I was like, O.K., this could potentially satisfy my parents.”

She moved to Florida, and they married in a quiet courthouse ceremony in 2009, but the short-lived marriage was marred by violence and isolation, she said. She had no friends or family in Florida, and Mr. Mateen preferred that she stay in the house.

She said he sometimes returned from work angry and agitated, including one night when she fell asleep on the floor waiting for him to return home.

“All I remember is being woken up by a pillow being taken from under my head,” she said. “I hit my head on the ground and then he started pulling my hair.”

“He almost killed me,” she said. “Because he started choking me. And I somehow got out of it and I tried to tackle him.”

She said that Mr. Mateen might have been gay but chose to hide his true identity out of anger and shame. A senior federal law enforcement official said on Monday that the F.B.I. was looking at reports that Mr. Mateen had used a gay dating app, and patrons of Pulse were quoted in news reports as saying that he had visited the club several times.

Ms. Yusufiy said that her ex-husband had told her that he frequented nightclubs before their marriage, but that he did not tell her they were gay clubs.

The couple separated within a year, and in 2011 Mr. Mateen filed for divorce. In the court filing, Mr. Mateen said the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” He did not elaborate.

He came to the F.B.I.’s attention in 2013, when some of his co-workers reported that he had made inflammatory comments claiming connections to overseas terrorists, and saying he hoped that the F.B.I. would raid his family’s home so that he could become a martyr.

The F.B.I. opened an investigation and put Mr. Mateen on a terrorist watch list for nearly a year.

James Comey, the F.B.I. director, said during a news conference on Monday that agents used various methods to investigate Mr. Mateen, including sending an undercover informant who made contact with the suspect, wiretapping his conversations and scrutinizing his personal and financial records.

They also sought help from Saudi intelligence officials to learn more about his trips to the kingdom in 2011 and 2012 for the Umrah, a sacred pilgrimage to Mecca made by Muslims. More than 11,000 Americans make pilgrimages to Mecca each year, and Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. found no “derogatory” information about his trips.

During interviews with F.B.I. agents, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Mateen said he had made the incendiary remarks “in anger” because his co-workers had ridiculed his Muslim background and he wanted to scare them. The F.B.I. closed its investigation and took him off the terrorist watch list.

But two months later, in July 2014, his name resurfaced in connection with the young man from coastal Florida, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who had traveled to Syria and carried out the suicide bombing at the hilltop restaurant. During the course of that investigation, F.B.I. agents learned that the two men had attended the same mosque and knew each other “casually,” Mr. Comey said.

The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Mateen a third time, but determined that his ties to the suicide bomber were not significant. The bureau had no further contact with Mr. Mateen.

Mr. Comey defended the work of his agents, although the bureau’s handling of the case is likely to be the subject of scrutiny and criticism in the coming weeks.
Graphic: What Happened Inside the Orlando Nightclub

Still, cases such as these rankle F.B.I. counterterrorism agents, who believe they draw criticism for any choices they make — either for leaving cases open too long, or for closing cases that don’t seem to have enough evidence.

Don Borelli, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor in New York, said there was a danger in criticizing agents who close investigations for lack of evidence.

“Can we allow people’s futures to be affected if there is no proven basis for it? That’s the flip side to all this,” he said.

Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, told reporters on Monday that the Justice Department might look to adopt new procedures that would alert counterterrorism investigators if someone who had been on a terror watch list tried to buy a gun.

Mr. Mateen bought the two weapons used in the attack just this month, officials said. “One would have liked to have known about it,” Ms. Yates said.

Federal investigators are now left to sift through disparate clues in search of any clear motive for Sunday’s killings.

The Islamic State has tried to turn the bloody event into a propaganda coup, and on Monday the group’s daily news bulletin boasted about the great victory carried out by “our brother, Omar Mateen.”

Mr. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, was unequivocal on Monday that his son had committed an “act of terrorism.” But the elder Mr. Mateen and other family members said they were still puzzled why a young man who had never been particularly religious is now being tied to the Islamic State’s murderous ideology.

They said that at this point they can find no easy explanations.

“Why did he do this?” his father asked. “He was born in America. He went to school in America. He went to college — why did he do that?”

“I am as puzzled as you are.”

Follow Mark Mazzetti @MarkMazzettiNYT, Eric Lichtblau @EricLichtblau and Alan Blinder @alanblinder on Twitter.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau reported from Washington, and Alan Blinder from Port St. Lucie, Fla. Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz from Boulder, Colo.; Mujib Mashal from Fort Pierce, Fla.; Richard A. Oppel Jr. from New York; and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Twice Scrutinized by F.B.I., Orlando Killer Exposes Gaps in Fighting ISIS-Inspired Acts.

Omar Mateen, an ‘Americanized Guy,’ Shows Threat of Lone Terrorists,
NYT,
June 13, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/us/
politics/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen.html

Gunman Claiming Allegiance to ISIS

Kills 50 at Orlando Nightclub

JUNE 12, 2016

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

ORLANDO, Fla. — A gunman who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State killed 50 people and wounded 53 in a crowded gay nightclub here early Sunday. The gunman, identified as Omar Mateen, had been investigated twice by the F.B.I. for possible connections to terrorism, the bureau said, but no ties could be confirmed.

Mr. Mateen, 29, an American citizen whose parents were from Afghanistan, called 911 and talked about the Islamic State shortly before the massacre at the Pulse nightclub, the worst mass shooting in American history, Ronald Hopper, an assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Tampa Division, said at a news conference. Other federal officials said more explicitly that he had declared allegiance to the group.

“The F.B.I. first became aware of him in 2013 when he made inflammatory comments to co-workers alleging possible terrorist ties,” but could not find any incriminating evidence, Agent Hopper said.

In 2014, the bureau investigated Mr. Mateen again, for possible ties to Moner Mohammad Abusalha, an American who grew up in Florida but went to Syria to fight for an extremist group and detonated a suicide bomb. Agent Hopper said the bureau concluded that the contact between the two men had been minimal, and that Mr. Mateen “did not constitute a substantive threat at that time.”

The suspicions did not prevent Mr. Mateen, who lived in Fort Pierce, Fla., from working as a security guard, or from buying guns. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Mr. Mateen legally bought a long gun and a pistol in the last week or two, though it was not clear whether those were the weapons used in the assault.

Hours after the attack, the Islamic State claimed responsibility in a statement released over an encrypted phone app used by the group. It stated that the attack “was carried out by an Islamic State fighter,” according to a transcript provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda.

But officials cautioned that even if Mr. Mateen, who court records show was born in New York and had been married and divorced, had been inspired by the group, there was no indication that it had trained or instructed him, or had any direct connection with him. The pair who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December also proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State, but investigators do not believe they had any contact with the group.

“The F.B.I. is appropriately investigating this as an act of terror,” President Obama said from the White House. He said that the gunman clearly had been ”filled with hatred” and that investigators were seeking to determine any ties to overseas terrorist groups.

“In the face of hate and violence, we will love one another,” he said. “We will not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead, we will stand united as Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us.”

As he had after previous mass shootings, the president said the shooting demonstrated again the need for what he called “common sense” gun measures.

“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school or a house of worship or a movie theater or a nightclub,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. To actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

The killer stormed the Pulse nightclub armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and a handgun at about 2 a.m., while more than 300 people were inside dancing and drinking, John Mina, the Orlando police chief, said. Mr. Mateen shot about one-third of the people in the packed club, mowing down patrons while many others, some of them bleeding, fled down the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood.

The result was the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadliest attack in the nation’s history on a specifically gay gathering. The F.B.I. set up a hotline for tips.

The gunman holed up inside with dozens of people effectively held hostage, some of them hiding in a restroom frantically calling for help, until about 5 a.m., when a police SWAT team, using an armored vehicle and stun grenades, raided the building and killed him. Officials said 11 law enforcement officers had exchanged fire with the gunman.

In that assault, an officer was wounded, his life saved by a Kevlar helmet that deflected a bullet, and at least 30 people were rescued, Chief Mina said. Some survivors escaped under cover of what the police called two “discretionary explosions.”

The shooting led to an increase in security at gay pride events and gay landmarks in cities around the country, including Washington, New York and Chicago. Law enforcement officials in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday confirmed the arrest of a heavily armed man who said he was in the area for West Hollywood’s gay pride parade. The authorities, however, said they did not know of any connection between the arrest and the Orlando shooting.

Some terrorist attacks, like the San Bernardino killings in December, were carried out in the name of Islam by people, some of them born and raised in the West, who were “self-radicalized.”

The Islamic State in particular has encouraged “lone wolf” attacks in the West, a point reinforced recently by a spokesman for the group, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, in his annual speech just before the holy month of Ramadan. In past years, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda ramped up attacks during Ramadan.

“Make it, Allah permitting, a month of hurt on the infidels everywhere,” Mr. Adnani said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group. Noting that some supporters have lamented that they cannot strike at military targets, he took pains to explain why killing civilians in the land of the infidel is not just permitted but encouraged.
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A member of the Orange County sheriff’s department at the scene of a shooting in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

Rasha Mubarak, the Orlando regional coordinator of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, released a statement saying: “We condemn this monstrous attack and offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed or injured. The Muslim community joins our fellow Americans in repudiating anyone or any group that would claim to justify or excuse such an appalling act of violence.”

The toll of the dead and injured far exceeded those of the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed, and the 2012 shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 26 people were killed.

Pulse, which calls itself “Orlando’s Latin Hotspot,” was holding its weekly “Upscale Latin Saturdays” party with three D.J.s and a midnight show. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and confusion, and some said it was hard at first to realize that the gunshots were not part of the loud, pulsing dance music.

“We were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam, and the only thing I could think of was to duck, but I ran out instead,” said Joel Figueroa, 19, of Orlando, who had been inside. “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door. I didn’t get to see the shooter.”

He said a friend of his had been shot three times and taken to a hospital.

Ray Rivera, a D.J. at the club, was playing reggae music in the patio area when the shooting started, while Latin music played inside the building.
Florida

“I heard shots, so I lower the volume of the music to hear better because I wasn’t sure of what I just heard,” Mr. Rivera said. “I thought it was firecrackers, then I realized that someone is shooting at people in the club.

“I heard like 40 shots coming from the main area of the club,” he continued. “I ran away through a side gate. I saw bodies on the floor, people on the floor everywhere. It was a chaos, everybody trying to get out.”

Mr. Rivera, 42, who has worked at Pulse for years, said: “This is a nice club, decent, people come from all over to dance and have a good time. Young people. A lot of young people were there last night. This is crazy.”

The club posted a message on its Facebook page about 3 a.m.: “Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.”

People streamed out of the club into a chaotic situation with little idea of where to go. “Cops were saying, ‘Go, go, clear the area,’” Christopher Hansen told an Orlando TV station. “You don’t know who’s what and who’s where.”

Witnesses and police officers carried bleeding people down the streets, sometimes loading them into police vehicles for the drive to hospitals rather than waiting for ambulances. The club is three blocks down South Orange Avenue from Orlando Regional Medical Center, the region’s primary trauma center, and two other hospitals also took in victims.

“Please keep everyone in your prayers as we work through this tragic event,” the nightclub’s post said. “Thank you for your thoughts and love.”

The Gay Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Central Florida said it was offering grief counseling to victims and survivors.

Officials at Orlando Regional Medical Center asked members of the families of victims and missing people to gather at the north entrance, where they would be escorted inside.

The slaughter at Pulse occurred a day after the singer Christina Grimmie, a star of YouTube and the reality TV show “The Voice,” was shot down after a concert in Orlando. The police said she had been killed by a St. Petersburg, Fla., man who drove to Orlando with the specific intention to kill Ms. Grimmie. The man, Kevin James Loibl, killed himself moments later.

Chief Mina said Mr. Loibl had traveled to Orlando with two handguns, several loaded magazines and a hunting knife. Police officials were examining his telephone and computer to try to determine a motive.

Lizette Alvarez reported from Orlando, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Reporting was contributed by Wendy Thompson and Les Neuhaus from Orlando; Alan Blinder in Fort Pierce, Fla.; Rukmini Callimachi from Paris; Eric Lichtblau and Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Steve Kenny, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Rick Rojas and Daniel Victor from New York.

Gunman Claiming Allegiance to ISIS Kills 50 at Orlando Nightclub,
NYT,
June 12, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/
us/orlando-nightclub-shooting.html