2015 Ankara bombings (Kızılay suicide bombings, 10 October 2015)

A scarf on the pavement and a clock stuck at 10:04

It was a bright October morning in Ankara. Kızılay, a hub of buses, metros and commerce, had filled with slow-moving crowds — trade union banners unfurled, coffee cups in hand, the low hum of people arranging signs and staging speakers. The rally, called “Labor, Peace and Democracy,” had been planned as a public plea amid a year that had become dangerous and unpredictable. Families, activists and ordinary commuters converged near the Central Railway Station to begin a march.

At 10:04 a.m., time itself seemed to tear. Two massive blasts detonated within moments of each other outside the railway station, in the narrow throat between buses and the metro entrances. In the shockwave’s wake, a scarf lay on the pavement as if abandoned by a sudden gust; nearby, flyers and personal items lay scattered like mute testimony. The square filled with dust and the acrid smell of smoke. Those first images — torn banners, shattered glass, stunned survivors pulling one another to safety — would be replayed in memory and footage for years.

When politics and a public plea met a hardened threat

The march that day was not spontaneous. It was the product of months of alarm. Earlier in 2015 the fragile ceasefire between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had collapsed in July, returning much of the country to a cycle of violence. Attacks that year — including the Suruç bombing in July — had already frayed public life. Political fault lines deepened, and the nation prepared for a snap parliamentary election scheduled for November 1.

Organizers had hoped the rally would be a voice against escalating bloodshed. A broad coalition — trade unions such as KESK, professional groups like the Chamber of Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) and the Medical Association (TTB), and leftist and pro‑Kurdish political formations including the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) — had called for “Labor, Peace and Democracy.” Thousands answered. What they were doing that morning was familiar in a democracy: assembling in a public square to demand safety, rights and an end to violence.

Yet Kızılay was also, in 2015, an exposed place. Central transit corridors concentrate bodies, and where people gather in numbers, attackers find targets. Public debate had already turned on questions of whether intelligence and policing had been adequate for large demonstrations. The fog of politics and a deteriorating security environment would complicate the days that followed.

Seventeen seconds that multiplied into a lifetime

Eyewitness accounts and later reporting put the explosions at roughly the same minute: 10:04 a.m. Two detonations, close together, tore through the crowd. The blasts were reported as suicide attacks. Buildings trembled, buses rocked, windows shattered. People collapsed in waves; others were thrown to the ground by the force. Panic spread as the crowd tried to understand whether the blasts had stopped and where to run.

First responders — municipal workers, bystanders, police and ambulance crews — rushed into the scene even as danger lingered. Blood pooled on pavement beside fallen placards. Injured people were tended to in improvised triage sites on the square and on station platforms, then ferried to hospitals across Ankara. Ambulances lined up outside emergency rooms. The city's medical staff faced one of the largest mass‑casualty events in modern Turkish history.

Initial confusion made early casualty figures fluid. In the hours and days that followed, authorities and news organizations would report evolving numbers. The confirmed toll that became widely cited was 109 dead and more than 500 wounded — a brutal accounting that reflected the scale and indiscriminate nature of the attack. Victims were ordinary: trade‑union members, activists, families, passersby.

Hands that pulled, hands that healed

Witnesses later described the scene as alternately frantic and tender. Strangers lifted strangers, tied makeshift tourniquets, shared clothing to staunch bleeding. The first hours were a blur of human response: people pulling debris away, drivers stopping to ferry the wounded, doctors and nurses working around the clock. Hospitals improvised extra spaces, and emergency rooms that morning became triage centers in a city under siege.

For many families the waiting was the worst. Calls to hospitals, frantic searches through wards, and then the arrivals of statements from authorities. Funerals and vigils followed quickly, as communities tried to contain their grief with ceremony. Mourners carried photographs and banners, and Kızılay itself became a field of memory and protest. The scale of loss was both personal and public; the nation watched as rows of bodies were identified and carried away.

The hunt for who and why

From the outset, the attack was treated as terrorism. Investigators began piecing together forensic evidence at the blast site, tracking flows of movement and examining fragments. Turkish prosecutors opened investigations and arrested suspects believed to be tied to facilitation networks. Over time, authorities focused on Islamist extremist cells and sought links to the Islamic State (ISIL/Daesh). Several suspects were indicted and, in some cases, convicted for roles in what prosecutors described as an ISIL‑connected operation.

Public statements condemned the attack at home and abroad. Yet alongside the official narrative, questions and suspicions multiplied. Some critics, including relatives of victims and opposition politicians, said intelligence services had failed to act on warnings or had not adequately protected a known mass gathering. In a nation already sharply divided, the attack became woven into political arguments: about responsibility, about state capacity, and about the balance between security and civil liberties.

A country grappling with security and civil rights

The bombings intensified an atmosphere that had been growing more securitized all year. Counterterrorism operations expanded, and police presence at public gatherings thickened. Government officials framed measures as essential to safety; critics argued that the response veered into broad crackdowns that swept up journalists, activists and political opponents alongside alleged militants.

Legal proceedings stemming from the Ankara bombing went on for years. Some defendants linked to ISIL were arrested and tried. But for many observers, the process raised as many questions as it resolved. Families of the dead pressed for more transparency and accountability, demanding clearer answers about intelligence coordination and preventive steps that might have averted the attack. Human rights groups warned that security policies enacted in the name of prevention risked eroding rights and civil society space.

The square remembers, and memory is contested

Kızılay never quite returned to the same rhythm. The physical damage — shattered windows, a battered bus, damaged station entrances — was repairable. The emotional damage was not. Memorials sprang up, and the square became a site for annual remembrance as well as ongoing political protest. The images from that morning — banners stained with dust, a distant ambulance siren, the stopped clock — were seared into the national consciousness.

Historians and commentators would note that the October 10 attack was among the deadliest terror incidents in modern Turkish history. Its significance lay not only in the casualty figures but in how it punctured the sense of public safety and intensified conversations about governance, accountability and the role of the state in protecting its citizens.

What remains unsettled

Years after the blasts, some facts are clearer than others. Investigators and prosecutors linked members of extremist networks to the attack and secured convictions in some cases. Yet controversies linger. Families of victims and opposition figures continued to press for fuller disclosure on intelligence briefings, potential lapses, and whether more could have been done to prevent massacres of civilians in public spaces.

The bombing also shaped policy in ways that were visible and invisible. Security at public gatherings increased; emergency planning evolved. But those measures existed alongside a broader political trend: a tightening of space for dissent and an escalation in rhetoric that framed many critics as security risks. For many in Turkey, the immediate safety response and the subsequent political climate became entangled, complicating how the nation remembered the dead and how it moved forward.

The long shadow of October

Tragedy often refracts into many forms of aftermath: grief, policy, politics and memory. The Kızılay bombings did all of these at once. In the cold light after the smoke cleared, families counted loved ones lost, tribunals unfolded, and a nation debated how best to keep its citizens safe without stripping away civic freedoms.

What remains is both a ledger of loss — roughly 109 dead, hundreds injured — and a reminder of a fragile civic bargain: that public assembly, even in fraught political times, is the language of a society trying to be heard. The square at Kızılay holds the traces: a scarred pavement, a taped‑off corner, the rhythm of buses resuming their routes. People still pass through, some carrying banners, some not. Both the memory of that morning and the questions it raised continue to shape Turkey’s politics and public life, long after October 10, 2015.