In the first minutes of 2017, as hundreds of people inside the Reina nightclub in the Ortakoy neighborhood of Istanbul celebrated the arrival of the new year, a gunman moved through the entrance and opened fire. The attack began at approximately 1:15 in the morning on January 1, 2017. By the time the shooting ended, thirty-nine people were dead and seventy-nine others had been wounded. The perpetrator, later identified as Abdulkadir Masharipov, an Uzbek national born on August 2, 1988, escaped in the immediate chaos and was not arrested until January 17, when Turkish police found him at a friend's apartment in the Esenyurt district of Istanbul. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for his actions.
The attack did not come from a vacuum. In the preceding year, Turkey had experienced a succession of devastating terrorist strikes that had put the country and its security forces under severe stress. The attack on Istanbul Ataturk Airport on June 28, 2016, had killed forty-eight people. A bombing at the Vodafone Arena on December 10, 2016, had killed forty-six. In response, Istanbul had placed seventeen thousand police officers on duty for New Year's Eve, one of the largest security deployments the city had seen for a single night. Despite these precautions, the attack succeeded.
The broader context of the attack reflected the intense pressure the Islamic State was under at the time. From the summer of 2016, the organization had suffered significant territorial losses across three simultaneous military offensives: the Turkish and Free Syrian Army offensive around al-Bab in northern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces' northern Raqqa offensive, and the major battle for Mosul in Iraq. The Turkish military intervention in Syria had brought Turkey into direct armed confrontation with ISIS for the first time, dramatically raising tensions. American officials had been tracking the Islamic State's Khorasan branch and its efforts to radicalize vulnerable individuals online and inspire lone-wolf attacks in Western and allied countries.
Masharipov reportedly carried an AKM rifle and entered the nightclub after killing a police officer and a civilian bystander at the entrance. Witnesses stated he was dressed to resemble Santa Claus. He moved through the crowded venue shooting, reportedly shouting the Arabic phrase Allahu akbar as he fired. Over the course of approximately seven minutes, he discharged more than 180 rounds and used stun grenades to cover his weapon reloading. The nightclub held around 600 people at the time of the assault. Most of the thirty-nine victims were killed at close range; forensic examination afterward revealed that a significant portion had been shot directly in the head. A number of survivors threw themselves into the waters of the Bosphorus strait to escape. After the assault, Masharipov moved into the kitchen of the nightclub, changed his clothing, and slipped out among the fleeing crowd.
The investigation that followed became one of the largest in Turkish history. Police set up cordons around the nightclub in the immediate aftermath, and Istanbul's governor Vasip Sahin confirmed the incident as a terrorist attack. The Turkish government ordered a temporary media blackout, citing concerns about security and public order during the ongoing investigation. Turkish military forces carried out retaliatory strikes against ISIS targets in the Syrian town of al-Bab, with Turkish officials claiming twenty-two people were killed in those raids.
The investigation spread quickly across Istanbul and beyond. Seven Uyghur restaurant workers were arrested in the Zeytinburnu district, which became the site of more than fifty police sweeps targeting individuals from Xinjiang, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. In Izmir, authorities arrested Syrians, Uyghurs, and Dagestanis. A total of thirty-six or more individuals were detained in connection with the investigation across multiple cities in the days following the attack. Kyrgyzstan passports were reportedly found to have been used by some of the detainees.
Masharipov, who used the alias Abu Muhammed Horasani, was found sixteen days after the attack in the Istanbul apartment of a Kyrgyz friend. Firearms, ammunition, two drones, and approximately $200,000 in cash were seized from the location. He was believed to have been trained in Afghanistan. His first trial, involving Masharipov and fifty-one accused accomplices, opened on December 11, 2017, with subsequent hearings continuing into 2018. The Reina massacre, as it became known in Turkey, stands as one of the most painful episodes of political violence in the country's modern history, a night of celebration turned into carnage by a single attacker operating in the name of a collapsing but still lethal organization.
