Qualla: 2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing

2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Zehra Yamaç was working the overnight cleaning shift when the blasts tore through the tarmac at Sabiha Gökçen International Airport. It was just after 2 o'clock in the morning of 23 December 2015. She was not a soldier or a diplomat or a security officer. She was a woman doing her job in the dark, on the apron of one of Istanbul's two international airports, when four mortar shells struck the aircraft stands around her. She died of her wounds in hospital. Her colleague, also injured, survived. The attack, later claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), brought a conflict raging hundreds of kilometers away in southeastern Turkey to the edge of a major European city — and to the life of one working woman whose death marked one of the year's most deeply unsettling moments.

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2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: Before the Dawn

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Sabiha Gökçen Airport sits on the Asian shore of Istanbul, in the district of Pendik — a long way in spirit from the mountain towns and valleys where the Turkish military and PKK militants had been fighting since the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations in July 2015. Yet the reach...

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2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: The Woman Who Died

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Zehra Yamaç was an airport cleaning worker — the kind of employee who moves through terminals and aprons largely unseen, keeping the machinery of mass transit running in the hours when passengers are not watching. In the immediate aftermath, Turkish authorities focused on flight ...

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2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: Responsibility and Context

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elelicht, CC BY-SA 3.0. Four days after the attack, on 27 December, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks — known by the initials TAK, an urban offshoot of the PKK — claimed the mortar bombing as an act of retaliation against the Turkish military's operations in Kurdish-populated cities in the southeast. The clai...

Image: Elelicht | CC BY-SA 3.0

2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: A City Caught Between

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. Istanbul exists in the crosscurrents of Turkey's modern history — a city of 15 million people, many of them Kurdish, many of them recent migrants from the very regions where violence was concentrated. The attack at Sabiha Gökçen deepened an already acute anxiety about whether the...

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2015 Sabiha Gökçen Airport Bombing: What Remains

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk), Public domain. The airport apron where the mortar shells struck has long since been repaired. Sabiha Gökçen International Airport continued to grow — it is now one of the busiest airports in Turkey, serving tens of millions of passengers a year. Most travelers who land or depart here know nothi...

Image: Turkmenistan.airlines.frontview.arp.jpg: elfuser derivative work: Elfuser (talk) | Public domain