Security sources said earlier that the terror attack targeted the checkpoint some 50 meters from riot police unit headquarters in Sirnak’s Cizre town. It comes a week after a suicide attack against the Kurdish community during a wedding in the neighbor city of Gaziantep, where 54 people were killed, majority children. The group has claimed responsibility for at least one attack on a police station.
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At least 1,900 people have died since July a year ago, including more than 650 members of the security forces, nearly half of whom have been killed by improvised explosive devices. Authorities have blamed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, for those attacks.
“This attack, which comes at a time when Turkey is engaged in an intense struggle against terrorist organizations both within and outside its borders, only serves to increase our determination as a country and a nation”, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a written statement.
Turkish security forces have been hit by near daily attacks by the PKK since the two-and-a-half year truce collapsed, leaving hundreds of police officers and soldiers dead. Across the Turkish border in northern Syria, a de-facto Kurdish independent state has been operating since the rise of ISIS two years ago.
Eleven Turkish police officers were killed and 78 people injured Friday in a suicide truck bombing by suspected Kurdish rebels, three days into a two-pronged Turkish offensive against jihadists and Kurdish militia in neighbouring Syria.
A Syrian rebel commander in charge of one of the main groups involved in the Turkish-backed operation told Reuters the forces now aimed to move westward after taking Jarablus, an advance that could take weeks or months to complete. Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict started in 1984.
Al-Sabah said Kuwait stands with Turkey and the worldwide community in the fight against terrorism, according to Kuwait’s official news agency KUNA.
Large plumes of smoke billowed from the blast site in Cizre, footage on CNN Turk showed.
The PKK, an armed group seen as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union, has recently stepped up its attacks in southeastern Turkey.
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The attacks on police came as the country was still reeling from a violent coup attempt on 15 July that killed at least 270 people.
