There are unconfirmed reports that the  armed assault on an American embassy in Turkey is the work of Al-Qaeda. As Ed Morrissey points out in his post, this doesn’t look like an AQ operation in size or scope, but with Al-Qaeda getting worn down by the Iraq war, their capabilities at this point may not be what they once were.

N.T.A. has a report up taken from translations of Turkish sources. The Telegraph report implies that these were Islamists:

Witnesses said the battle began around 11am and raged for at least eight minutes as the assailants, who had driven to the consulate, apparently tried to gain access.

Television images showed bodies lying on the pavement, with trails of blood and weapons scattered around them. Police said they had recovered shotguns, rifles and handguns.

The police post was outside the consulate’s main public entrance, from where steep steps lead up to the fortified building.

A witness, Yavuz Erkut Yuksel said the attackers emerged from a white vehicle and surprised the officer at the guard post. “One of them approached a policeman while hiding his gun and shot him in the head,” he said.

Another witness described the attackers as “terrorists, with beards and long hair.”

“There were four people. Three of them got out of the car and fired at the police. I saw them dead afterwards lying on the ground and many more dead among the police,” said Enis Yilmaz, who was at the consulate for a visa.

Turkey has been targeted by a variety of groups in recent years, including Kurdish separatists and Islamist militants.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, suspicion immediately fell on Islamist militants who have launched a number of raids and bomb attacks in the city in recent years.

The US consulate building was moved and fortified after home-grown Islamists linked to al-Qa’eda bombed two synagogues, the British Consulate and a British bank in Istanbul in 2003, killing 58 people.

Because Al-Qaeda has been active in Turkey before, it’s easy to suspect them, but freelance Jihadism isn’t out of the question either as hardline Islamism becomes the mainstream in Muslim countries.