On January 28, two Islamic State (IS) gunmen attacked the Roman Catholic Church of Santa Maria in Istanbul, killing one person and injuring another. It was the group’s first successful attack in Turkey since January 1, 2017, when thirty-nine people were killed and seventy-nine injured in a shooting at the Reina nightclub. The toll of the church incident would likely have been much higher if the perpetrators’ guns had not jammed, averting an even worse tragedy.
The long gap between these IS attacks was not for lack of trying, however. IS external operations networks from Syria and Afghanistan had tried and failed to strike Turkey for the previous seven years, and many homegrown plots had been disrupted as well. Indeed, the scale of this plotting has been voluminous, illustrating Ankara’s ability to thwart the group’s goal of undermining security in Turkey.
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