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The suicide bomber who killed at least 10 foreigners Tuesday in a popular central Istanbul tourist area belonged to ISIS

pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while proving willing time and again to lash out elsewhere.

at least nine Germans were killed.

A Syrian suicide bomber is thought to be responsible for an attack which killed at least ten people including foreigners in the heart of Istanbul's historic Sultanahmet tourist district on Tuesday, President Tayyip Erdogan said.

There was a high probability Islamic State militants were behind the blast near the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, major tourist sites in the center of one of the world's most visited cities, two senior Turkish security officials told Reuters.

Several bodies lay on the ground in the Sultanahmet square in the immediate aftermath of the blast. A police officer and witness at the scene also reported seeing several body parts.

Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 10 in Istanbul District of Sultanahmet

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said a Syrian suicide bomber was behind the attack, the latest in a series of terrorist assaults on Turkey.

A deputy prime minister of Turkey, Numan Kurtulmus, said at a news conference that the assault on Tuesday had been carried out by a Syrian man born in 1988.

Turkey withdrew early Saturday from a landmark European treaty protecting women from violence that it was the first country to sign 10 years ago and that bears the name of its largest city.

Hundreds of women gathered in Istanbul to protests against the move on Saturday.

The Council of Europe’s Secretary General, Marija Pejčinović Burić, called the decision “devastating.” “This move is a huge setback to these efforts and all the more deplorable because it compromises the protection of women in Turkey, across Europe and beyond,” she said.

While the protest began over plans to destroy a park, for many demonstrators it had moved beyond that to become a broad rebuke to the 10-year leadership of Mr. Erdogan and his government, which they say has adopted authoritarian tactics.

“It’s the first time in Turkey’s democratic history that an unplanned, peaceful protest movement succeeded in changing the government’s approach and policy,” said Sinan Ulgen, the chairman of the Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, a research group in Istanbul. “It gave for the first time a strong sense of empowerment to ordinary citizens to demonstrate

The Interior Ministry said it had arrested 939 people at demonstrations across the country, and that 79 people were wounded, a number that was probably low. After Friday’s protests, which were smaller and less violent than those on Saturday, a Turkish doctors’ group reported nearly 1,000 injuries.

A railway tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait has been opened in Turkey, creating a new link between the Asian and European shores of Istanbul.

Japan invested $1bn of the $4bn (£3.4bn) total cost of the project, named Marmaray,

In theory it brings closer the day when it will be possible to travel from London to Beijing via Istanbul by train.

Turkey commemorates 562nd anniversary of Istanbul's conquest by the Ottoman Empire in a massive ceremony in Istanbul's Yenikapı district public arena on Saturday afternoo

Lisel Hintz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said that Imamoglu “deserves credit” for not engaging in the polarization of Turkish politics. His message of inclusion not just appealed to minorities and his party’s traditional base among secularists and the Turkish left, but conservative AKP voters as well. At his victory rally, supporters made heart signs with their hands.

Rather than being an example of how democracies die, Turkey showcases the fact that they don’t die all that easily,” wrote Murat Somer, a professor of political science at Koc University in Istanbul. “The ascendance of authoritarianism triggers an equally strong pro-democratic reaction. And the case of the Istanbul rerun offers insights into how such impulses may be able to succeed against polarizing and populist authoritarian politics.”

World Humanitarian Summit attacks 'broken' system Participants in UN summit in Istanbul call for better aid system and new focus on preventing trouble before it begins.

The way world powers respond to humanitarian crises has been labelled "broken" at a gathering of world leaders in Istanbul.

"It is shameful that rich countries are moaning, complaining, sending refugees back, cutting deals behind their backs ... We want to see rich countries step up to the plate, absorb refugees and give them opportunities in their countries," Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the aid group Oxfam International, told Al Jazeera.

ISTANBUL — Fighter jets raced across the Istanbul sky, painting the Turkish flag with ribbons of colored smoke, as a military band with nearly 600 musicians marched below. Hundreds of thousands of people looked on, in an event that quickly took on the fervor of a religiously infused political rally.

The event being celebrated so lavishly last Saturday occurred 562 years ago, when the Ottomans conquered what was then called Constantinople

Never mind that when Turkish voters choose a new Parliament on Sunday, Mr. Erdogan will not be on the ballot. The election will still largely be a referendum on him, and on his plans to transform Turkey’s Constitution and concentrate more power in an executive presidency

Amr Farrag is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood youth cadre. The 28-year-old Cairene is a widely followed exponent of the organization’s ideology on social media and manages the popular pro-Brotherhood news portal Rassd. But these days, he no longer operates in Cairo. On July 5, 2013—two days after the Egyptian military responded to mass protests by removing Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi—the organization’s leaders urged Farrag to relocate to Istanbul, so that he could evade the Egyptian government’s anti-Brotherhood crackdown and reestablish the organization’s media operations in exile. Meanwhile, as many more Muslim Brothers fled to Turkey during the chaotic weeks that followed Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood formed a committee in Istanbul to resettle them, hoping to preserve the organization until it could return to power in Egypt, which it promised its members would happen very soon.

Mar 6 2016, 3:08 pm ET International Women's Day Rally in Turkey Turns Violent

Turkish police on Sunday briefly detained at least one woman and fired rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of hundreds of people trying to mark International Women's Day in central Istanbul.

Women's Day commemorations on March 8 in order to draw more supporters on a Sunday, had ignored a ban on the march by the Istanbul governor who scrapped this year's rally, citing security concerns.

suicide bombing on Sultanahmet Square Tuesday killed 10 people -- all of them Germans, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday.

deadliest attack on Germans abroad in more than 13 years

Turkey detained 68 suspected terrorists in sweeps across seven provinces,

Attackers struck in the middle of the day Thursday

CNN security analyst Bob Baer likened the Jakarta attack to the November 13 Paris massacre in which terrorists linked to ISIS struck several locations at the same time. Yet the number of dead was nowhere near the toll of 130 in France, with Clarke Jones,

hub -- killing at least

The result is that, for the first time since the republic was founded nearly a century ago, many from the old moneyed class, in particular the secular elite who have dominated Turkey’s cultural and business life for decades, are moving away and the new rich close to Mr. Erdogan and his governing party are taking their place.

Thousands of Turks like her have applied for business visas in Britain or for golden visa programs in Greece, Portugal and Spain, which grant immigrants residency if they buy property at a certain level.

With the help of subsidies and favorable contracts, the government has helped new businesses to emerge, and they are rapidly replacing the old ones, he said. “There is a transfer of capital underway,” he said. “It is social and political engineering.”

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded — but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.

The country’s heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.

Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far — 8.8 million out of a population of 83 million — using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.

a plan to remake a city park in Taksim Square into a replica Ottoman-era army barracks and mall,

By evening, no police officers were in sight, and most of the protesters were gathered on the lawns of the square, some drinking beer, others chanting antigovernment slogans.

The widening chaos here and the images it produces threaten to tarnish Turkey’s image, which Mr. Erdogan has carefully cultivated