The PKK’s critics say that this loose structure allows the main Kurdish group to keep acts of carnage perpetrated against victims – like the Ankara attack, which killed nearly exclusively innocent civilians – at an acceptable distance from the larger militant group.
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On the evening of Sunday, March 13, a auto bomb tore through a crowded transport hub in Ankara, killing 37 people and injuring 125 others. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said he had received “very serious and nearly certain” findings that the PKK was responsible.
TAK is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
German diplomatic missions and a school in Turkey were closed on Thursday after receiving a terror threat, the Foreign Ministry announced, less than a week after a suicide vehicle bomb attack in the Turkish capital.
Turkey and the United States consider the PKK to be a terrorist organization, but the two North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies have been at loggerheads over the classification of the YPG.
In January, 10 German tourists died in a suicide bombing in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square.
The five people arrested overnight stand accused of “an attack on Turkish unity and on the Turkish people”, Anatolia said, citing an Ankara court which ordered the detentions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed Europe on Friday, saying a recent terrorist attack in Ankara could happen in any European city due to its “carelessness” in relation to terrorism. “We’re confident that it can only be solved in the political plain”, Zakharova said.
The report also said she was in Syria by December 6, 2013, after traveling to the city of Diyarbakir in the predominantly Kurdish southeast on November 30, 2013.
Kurdish people hold placards depicting Turkish leaders and reading “partner of the Islamic State group (IS)” as they take part in a protest to call for an end of the Turkish State terror in Kurdistan, during the European Union summit in Brussels on March 18, 2016. PKK has been fighting for Kurdish independence from Ankara since 1984.
The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK, warned that more attacks are possible.
A two-year-old ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK broke down last summer.
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Europe is “dancing in a minefield” by directly or indirectly supporting terrorist groups, Erdogan said at commemoration of the 101st anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli in the coastal town of Canakkale. It said 11 people had been detained in connection with the blast.
