[10] Police seized guns, explosives, bomb-making booklets and 4,000 compact discs with training advice from Osama bin Laden, and believed that the suspects were members of the radical Islamic group Ansar al-Islam, thought to be linked with al-Qaeda.

[14] Nevertheless, a small bomb or explosive devise blew up on an empty Turkish Airlines plane on 29 June as workers were cleaning it at the main Istanbul airport.

The newspaper Cumhuriyet for instance called the situation "a total disgrace" and commented that Istanbul and Ankara looked like "ghost cities for a couple of days, imprisoning the people, emptying the streets and stopping boats from leaving.

In a separate protest, Greenpeace activists, dangling from a bridge over the Bosphorus Strait, unfurled a 30-meter banner showing a dove of peace with a nuclear missile in its beak and the phrase "Nukes out of NATO".

[24] The 2004 Istanbul summit consisted of four main meetings, all held in the Istanbul Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center: the North Atlantic Council (NATO's highest decision-making body, attended by heads of state and government from each of the 26 Alliance member countries); the NATO-Russia Council (which met only at the level of foreign ministers, since Russian President Vladimir Putin stayed away, reflecting ongoing tension between NATO and Russia over NATO enlargement and the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty); the NATO-Ukraine Commission; and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (46 countries including many former Eastern bloc and former Soviet states).

[3] Almost forgotten in coverage of the summit was that six new members from the former Warsaw Pact – Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania – plus Slovenia, joined NATO in March 2004 and were formally welcomed into the Alliance.

[27] During the summit, NATO members officially agreed that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would take on command of four additional Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) (one in Mazar-e-Sharif, Meymana, Feyzabad and Baghlan),[28] falling short of the initial target of five.

[30] NATO also vowed to beef up its Afghanistan peace force from 6,500 to 10,000 to help make the 2004 Afghan presidential election secure, but no actual agreement for that many additional troops was made.

The summit was dominated by divisions over the Iraq War as NATO members were only able to agree to limited assistance in the form of training for Iraqi security forces.

[35][36] NATO leaders also decided to launch the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative[35] (ICI) with selected states in the Greater Middle East, thus exceeding a Mediterranean scope.

[37] The initiative was an offer to engage in practical security cooperation activities with these states[38] and each interested country would be considered by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis and on its own merit.

NATO members regard these partnerships as a response to the new challenges of the 21st century and as a complement to the G8 and US-EU decisions to support calls for reform from within the Broader Middle East region.

The ICI offers practical cooperation with interested nations in the Greater Middle East in such areas as: counter-WMD; counterterrorism; training and education; participation in NATO exercises; the promotion of military interoperability; disaster preparedness and civil emergency planning; tailored advice on defense reform and civil-military relations; and cooperation on border security to help prevent illicit trafficking of drugs, weapons, and people.

NATO leaders hoped to boost the Alliance's anti-terrorism efforts with an agreement to improve intelligence sharing and to develop new, high-tech defences against terrorist attacks.

The Alliance's AWACS early warning radar aircraft and Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Defence Battalion would be made available to any member that requests such assistance.

One rift existed about NATO's non-ratification of the adapted CFE treaty and Russia's non-fulfillment of its OSCE obligations (the withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldova and Georgia).

Even before the summit commenced, the rift was visible as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stopped, en route to Istanbul, in Moldova where he called for the withdrawal of Russian forces from the country.

[4][34] According to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov these withdrawal demands were incorrect, because "the political understandings did not set any time limit for physical action".

[4] Regarding Afghanistan, Lavrov expressed the interest of Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States in suppressing terrorism and called for "establishing ties" and "developing cooperation" between NATO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).

This would require showing commitment to the values that underpin the Alliance (democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech and media, and fair elections) as was foreseen in the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan, which was adopted during the 2002 Prague Summit.

In particular NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer criticized Kuchma's record on freedom of press and preparations for the Ukrainian presidential election of November 2004.

First of all, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) Heads of State and Government met with President Hamid Karzai of the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan and discussed the progress in that country, and recognized the valuable role played by both Allies and Partners who make up the ISAF, but also emphasized that much remains to be done for Afghanistan to become a peaceful and stable country, fully integrated into the international community.

In this respect, NATO's intention to place a special focus on relations with the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia was welcomed, including the decision by the Alliance to appoint one liaison officer for each region.

[7] The international media reported that expectations for a successful summit were deliberately set low, because NATO leaders wanted to avoid a flare-up over the Iraq War.

Therefore, they agreed to meet the modest goals the Alliance had already set for itself in trying to stabilize Afghanistan, and endorsed a tepid version of the Bush administration's initiative to promote modernization and democracy in the Arab world.

[26] The newspaper further commented that the summit had "a sort of "Waiting for Godot" quality about it – European leaders biding time, neither creating a crisis nor mending fences, in the hope that the American election in November will somehow spare them from the choice between having to deal with Bush and letting Iraq, and NATO, slide into further disarray.

One example is the NATO summit in Istanbul in 2004, where the concluded measures hardly required a meeting of the heads of state and government, and the media presence was not justified by the agreed-upon resolutions.

"[53] US and other government officials however emphasized that the summit was significant in terms of the alliance's unprecedented outreach beyond its traditional North Atlantic focus and its aggressive emphasis on force planning to tackle new challenges worldwide.

It marked the increasingly key role played by Turkey as a major strategic hub due to its location close to the hotbeds of tension and conflict in the South Caucasus and the Middle East.