“It has been revealed that this attack was carried out by members of the terrorist organisation in cooperation with a YPG member who infiltrated (Turkey) from Syria”, Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara, confirming the bomber was a Syrian national named Salih Necar and saying nine people had been detained over the attack.
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Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has accused the Syrian-based Kurdish YPG militia of being behind Wednesday’s deadly bombing in Ankara.
The situation is complicated by Syrian Kurdish militia groups in Iraq and Syria who have been fighting Islamic State, or ISIL, militants alongside the United States and its allies.
Turkey says Wednesday’s attack on a military bus, killing 28 people, was carried out by the PKK and its Syrian affiliates.
Nevertheless, the Kurds in Turkey claim that the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (the MIT) is responsible for the blast, arguing that it knew the attacker from the time he arrived in the state. In Iraq next door, the Turkish air force has resumed airstrikes in the Qandil mountains, where the PKK have bases. Davutoglu also blamed Syria’s government for allegedly backing the Syrian Kurdish militia.
Turkey links Syrian Kurds to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) separatists and labels both terrorist organizations.
“We say to the people of Turkey and the global community: there is no relation between us, the YPG, and yesterday’s incidents in Ankara”, it added.
The attack, the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State, comes as Turkey gets dragged ever deeper into the war in neighbouring Syria and tries to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast. The Turkish jets attacked PKK positions in northern Iraq’s Haftanin region, hitting the rebels, which it said included a number of senior PKK leaders. The U.S. already lists the PKK as a terror group. Ankara alleges IS has carried out attacks inside Turkey, and the Turkish military has bombed IS positions.
Six soldiers were killed and another was wounded Thursday in a roadside bombing that hit an armored military vehicle in the southeastern Turkish province of Diyarbakir, Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency reported, citing the Turkish General Staff. The YPG has taken advantage of the chaos caused by the Russian-backed Syrian military offensive on Aleppo to seize more territory from other opposition groups.
“Turkey is increasingly likely to enter the civil war in Syria directly because its leadership determine they can not tolerate Kurdish forces seizing the entire Syria-Turkey border area”, Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which conducts research and analysis for the US Congress, told Sputnik. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of refugees leave every night from Turkey to cross the sea to Greece in smugglers’ boats.
The government meanwhile, imposed a gag order which bans media organizations from broadcasting or printing graphic images of the dead or injured from the scene of the explosion and also banned reporting on any details of the investigation.
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There was no immediate claim of responsibility although suspicion fell on the PKK and the Islamic State group.
