UPDATED: March 24, 2016 at 3:26 p.m.

Talya Sever’s home countries have been bombed twice in the last month.

As both a Turkish and Belgian citizen, Sever, a junior economics major at Syracuse University, has seen the places where she has lived and worked engulfed in violence and subject to horrors beyond her imagination.

Three bombs were detonated in Belgium on Tuesday, two at Brussels Airport and one at a subway station. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Thirty-four people have been killed and 270 wounded, according to the latest numbers from The Associated Press. Belgian authorities have identified two of the suicide bombers who carried out the attacks, but authorities are still looking for at least one more assailant, according to The New York Times.

In the last few weeks, Turkish cities Ankara and Istanbul have experienced terrorist attacks similar to those in Belgium. An explosion killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 100 in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, on March 13. A week later, a car bomb killed four people in Istanbul.

Corri Zoli, the director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at SU, said Turkey has been subject to a steady stream of violence for the past six months.

Sever is a second-generation Belgian citizen. Both she and her parents were born in the country, but she is of Turkish descent. She moved to Turkey when she was 10 and lived there until she started high school. Then she moved back to Belgium to finish high school and apply to college in the United States.

Maggie Cregan | Contributing Photographer

Sever considers being Belgian and Turkish both important parts of her identity. That’s why it’s troubling to her that the Belgian attacks have been drawing disproportionate news coverage and sympathy from the public, when the bombings in Ankara and Istanbul were blips on people’s radars.

“It made me feel very bad because Belgium is my house, my parents work near the train station, my best friend lost her cousin in the metro station,” she said. “But Turkey has the same issues; it’s sad that the media and the world did not acknowledge Turkey in the same way.”

Sever guesses that the disproportionate attention on Belgium — and on Paris following the November 2015 terrorist attacks on the city — stem from the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country and not a part of the European Union.

“If I were in Istanbul, killed in an attack, would anyone acknowledge my death?” Sever said. “I just want the SU community to understand that these things just don’t happen to Belgium.”

 

 

Published on March 23, 2016 at 10:52 pm

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu