LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS for TIME LOCAL VICTIMS: His family mourns Nazmi Harmankaya, a guard at the consulate. Like most of the dead, he was Turkish
Knocking On Europe's Door
	The Istanbul blasts open a new front in the terror war. Al-Qaeda's message: beware Britain and Muslims who cooperate with the west
	By ANDREW PURVIS and JOHANNA MCGEARY

Posted Sunday, November 23, 2003; 15.23GMT
Victoria Short and her husband were going to have coffee. So the petite, fair-haired wife of the British consul general in Istanbul left the consulate and stepped across the street to buy some milk a few minutes before 11 a.m. local time last Thursday. She paused to chat with the Turkish shopkeeper, whom she had known for years. As they gazed back across the street at the 19th century building in Beyoglu, one of the city's historic neighborhoods, a green catering van sped up the narrow street and smashed into the wrought-iron gates of the consulate's walled compound. Then it blew up.

The explosion sent shockwaves through the crowded, twisting streets of Beyoglu; a warren of covered stalls and cobblestone avenues that has been the heart of Istanbul's expatriate community for centuries. Windows were blown out up to half a kilometer away, sending glass crashing down on Istanbul's toniest shopping street and leaving curtains fluttering aimlessly in the damp breeze. The annex where consul general Roger Short had been temporarily housed while the compound was undergoing renovations was a pile of yellow cement and dust, the famous gardens seared black by the heat of the blast. The bomb killed 18 people, including three passersby. Roger Short's body was buried under an almost 2 m pile of wreckage. The smoking, twisted remains of cars lined the street. Stopping an insistent woman from moving closer to the carnage, a police officer told her, "Sorry, beyond this you will be walking on bits of people." A rescue worker, cloaked in dust as he dug, reported: "We're not pulling anyone out intact."

Those who bloodied this holy day and massacred innocent people will account for it in both worlds. They will be damned until eternity. RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN, Prime Minister of Turkey

"Of course we had talked about the possibility of an armed attack," an anguished Victoria Short told friends later. "But I never imagined anything like today."

The unimaginable had happened across town as well, just 12 minutes earlier, when a car stuffed with explosives detonated outside the 18-story Turkish headquarters of the London-based international bank HSBC. "There was a tremendous sound," says Cafer Yilmaz, 30, who ran the bakery across the street. "The windows and walls caved in on me. I ran outside, the whole street was covered in thick black fog. That first moment was not at all like you would imagine from the movies — no one was screaming or running, everyone was stunned."

The screaming and running began soon enough. As the 600-odd people inside the bank staggered out, they found Istanbul's busiest boulevard strewn with falling glass, paper and body parts. The building's white marble façade was sheared away. Flying glass had decapitated a taxi driver and killed a famous Turkish stage actor, Kerem Yilmazer, who had paused at a red light nearby.

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