Smoke rises from damaged police headquarters after a suicide truck bombing killed eleven Turkish police officers and injured 78 people on August 26, 2016 in Cizre, southeastern Turkey, in an attack blamed on Kurdish militants, state media said.
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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.
In an ostensibly anti-jihadi operation, Turkish troops, supplemented by Turkish-trained Syrian rebels, thwarted Kurdish plans for territorial expansion on Wednesday by taking over Jarablus, a Syrian town Isis had held since July 2013.
Heightened PKK attacks inside Turkey could prompt Turkey to take bolder moves against the Syrian Kurds.
Control of Jarablus was a central goal of Kurdish militias in Syria, who had hoped to join two separate cantons they control in the north of the country and create a self-administered state along Turkey’s southern border.
The military has conducted several operations and imposed punishing curfews in towns and cities in southeast Turkey over the past year that have claimed civilian lives, including in Cizre, a bastion of PKK support.
The PKK – also listed as a terrorist organisation by the USA and the European Union – resumed its 30-year armed campaign against the Turkish state in July 2015 and has slaughtered more than 600 security personnel yet, while more than 7,000 PKK terrorists have also been killed.
The armed wing of the the PKK – a militant Kurdish group that’s labeled a terror group by many in the worldwide community – took credit Friday for the attack. Authorities have blamed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, for those attacks. Human rights groups say hundreds of civilians have also been killed. Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict started in 1984. The government has blamed the failed coup on the supporters of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen and has embarked on a sweeping crackdown on his followers. The attack was presented by some politicians as an assassination attempt against Kilicdaroglu and an attack on democracy in Turkey.
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Dusan Stojanovic and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul contributed.
