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.
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“I can assure you not even one bullet is fired by the YPG into Turkey…”
Merkel has been working closely with Turkey lately in an effort to reduce the flow of migrants to Europe.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who had been due to leave for a trip to Brussels later on Wednesday, cancelled the trip, an official in his office said.
SYRIAN GOVERNMENT: Ties between Ankara and Damascus – marked by a personal friendship between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar Assad – soured following Syria’s crackdown on the opposition in 2011. “Russian warplanes are providing support for the Kurdish offensive, which is aimed at securing full control of the Turkish border, while Russia has also promised to support the Syrian Kurds” goal of federal status, he said.
Can Dundar, the editor of Cumhuriyet, as well as several other Turkish journalists have been arrested in recent months for publishing newspaper articles that exposed the MIT in providing weapons to terror groups in Syria.
Kurdish rebels, the Islamic State group and a leftist extremist group have carried out attacks in the country recently. There were no injuries because the association was closed at the time.
The Turkish government vowed to strike back and has detained 14 people allegedly involved in the incident.
Some Turkish media reports said 11 people had been killed.
Those attacks were blamed on IS jihadists, as were two other deadly bombings in the country’s Kurdish-dominated southeast earlier in the year.
The PKK has been fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy since 1984. A fragile peace process with the Kurdish rebels collapsed in the summer.
A suicide bombing in the historic heart of Istanbul in January, also blamed on Islamic State, killed 10 German tourists.
The Turkish government has also accused some nations, who it calls foreign powers, of being behind the terrorist groups and blaming them for being pawns.
Governor Mehmet Kiliclar said the bomb appeared to have targeted a convoy of buses carrying military personnel.
If Ankara has evidence that the YPG – the military wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) – was behind the attack, it has not yet been released.
He also said the fighters worked in co-operation with militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey.
Davutoglu named the perpetrator as Salih Necar, a Syrian national and member of the YPG People’s Protection Units.
Turkish forensic teams inspect scene of Wednesday’s explosion in Ankara, after a auto bombing that targeted military vehicles.
The military said the planes struck the region of Haftanin on Wednesday night, targeting a group of 60-70 PKK rebels including a number of senior leaders.
Turkey has for decades been at war with the PKK, which operates in southern Turkey and northern Iraq and agitates for greater independence.
A top PKK leader, Cemil Bayik, said his organization did not know who carried out the bombing.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “In the battle against those responsible for these inhuman acts we are on the side of Turkey”. Yet, as this column went to press, no group had claimed responsibility for the attack.
