ISTANBUL — An Islamic State disciple kills 39 New Year’s revelers at an Istanbul nightclub. A gunman with a police badge assassinates Russia’s ambassador at an Ankara reception. Kurdish separatist bombers kill 14 soldiers on a bus in central Turkey and dozens of police officers at an Istanbul soccer match.

Those assaults were just in the last few weeks, which made a car bombing on Thursday in the city of Izmir, where at least two civilians were killed, seem relatively minor.

The 75 million people of Turkey, the NATO member and European Union aspirant that straddles Europe and Asia and was once seen as a stable democracy, are facing a ferocious onslaught of terrorist attacks unlike anything that has been seen in the West.

Add to that the tumult from roughly three million Syrian war refugees, a resurgent Kurdish insurgency and a failed military coup — all tied, in the eyes of many Turks, to American negligence, or malice, or both.