Turkish gunmen shared a bleak background

ISTANBUL, TURKEY —  The electronic buzzer sounded, and the gaggle of gangly 14- and 15-year-old boys jumped up, scattering pumpkin seeds they’d been cracking between their teeth. Their brief break was over; now they had to hurry back to their jobs in the textile factory.

In the impoverished enclave of Kucukcekmece, on the far fringes of Istanbul, the three young attackers who died trying to storm the U.S. Consulate on Wednesday lived within a few blocks of one another in ramshackle, illegally constructed homes known by the evocative Turkish term gecekondu -- built overnight.

Two of the three attackers had worked in a textile factory similar to this one, in keeping with the neighborhood pattern of school dropouts trying to help support large families that have relocated from the countryside. Their labor provides a short-term economic boost but leaves them without education or prospects.

The drab, run-down district where the attackers lived is a world apart from the deep-blue Bosporus, the chic cafes, the minarets and monuments of tourist Istanbul, though the city center is only a 40-minute drive away. Tens of thousands of economic migrants from Turkey’s poorest corners have come here to seek better lives. Often, they find only greater hardship.

Neighbors and relatives of the assailants said they did not understand why the three did what they did.

But the backgrounds and profiles provided in official accounts appeared strikingly similar to those of young men involved in previous Al Qaeda-inspired attacks in Turkey: largely uneducated, poor, not known to be religiously devout until they found themselves in contact with a charismatic “elder brother.”

One of them, 23-year-old Bulent Cinar, was a former goat herder with only a grade school education, police said.

None of those spoken to in the neighborhood questioned the official account, confirmed by witnesses and security cameras, of the three men leaping from a vehicle late Wednesday morning and spraying bullets at Turkish police guarding the fortresslike U.S. complex.

Three police officers died; the attackers were swiftly gunned down as well. Turkish authorities said that by late Friday, 10 people had been arrested and that more arrests were likely.

Those being held included the alleged driver of the getaway vehicle, who reportedly told police he was merely hired to drive and did not know of the men’s plans until the shooting erupted, when he sped away.

Another man was arrested in southeastern Turkey. Authorities said he had been in frequent cellphone contact with the assailants until shortly before the attack.

Two mainstream Turkish newspapers, Hurriyet and Milliyet, said detainees included members of a second group that had been planning a separate attack in coming days.

One of the three consulate attackers, Erkan Kargin, was thought to have traveled to Afghanistan for training. One possible motive raised in Turkish press reports was the death of a fellow trainee from Kargin’s home province in an air attack by coalition troops in Afghanistan.

Authorities were also looking for links to a raid in January near the Anatolian city of Gazientep, which targeted a radical group suspected of having ties to or drawing inspiration from Al Qaeda. Five people were killed in the operation.

The crude pistol-and-shotgun attack on the consulate, which stood little chance of penetrating security at the complex, was described by analysts as lacking Al Qaeda’s sophistication. Turkish officials said that suggested the group might have had only the loosest links to the network, drawing primarily on its ideology.

Turkish authorities have worked particularly hard to keep tabs on homegrown militant groups since 2003, when Al Qaeda-linked militants killed more than 60 people in an assault on the British Consulate, a bank and two synagogues in central Istanbul.

Officials said they were looking at the possibility that Kargin, 26, the oldest of the three attackers, had recruited the younger two and organized the assault. But his distraught family said they doubted he had been the ringleader.

“He was mentally unbalanced -- he was having treatment at the mental health clinic,” said a man who answered the door at the family home. He identified himself as an older brother but did not want his name used. “I don’t believe he was responsible for planning this.”

Istanbul’s governor, Muammer Guler, on Friday called the consulate assault a “suicide attack,” suggesting that the gunmen knew there was no possible escape once they opened fire.

Kucukcekmece residents painted a portrait of a neighborhood blighted by deprivation, discrimination and neglect, its young people trapped in a grinding, dead-end cycle of itinerant labor and factory work.

“I can’t even read!” said Melek Sincanli, a 65-year-old widow with deep-carved wrinkles. She took a pen from a journalist’s hand and made a childlike squiggle -- her signature, as taught to her by her husband. “That’s all I know,” she said.

Relatives described assailant Raif Topcil, who was to enter the Turkish army this summer, as a young man more interested in computer games than religion. He and Cinar worked at one point in the same textile workshop in what were described as sweatshop conditions.

“He was tricked, he was fooled,” said an aunt, Ayse Sevin. “He was a decent boy, calm. We know he did not set out to do something like this.”

The attack galvanized anti-American sentiment that is never far from the surface here. One of the police officers wounded in the attack, Osman Dagli, said he tried to take shelter in the consulate after he was hit, but the doors were not opened to him.

The U.S. ambassador, Ross Wilson, said American security staff did aid the injured policemen. But the consulate goes into a state of automatic lockdown at the first sign of attack, and no consulate guards came outside during the gunfight.

Dagli, who killed two of the attackers before running out of bullets, told Turkish newspapers that consular officials sent him flowers in the hospital but that he refused to accept them.

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laura.king@latimes.com