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Auto bomb attack in Turkey kills 8 police; 45 wounded

Eight police officers were killed and 45 more people wounded, two of them seriously, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, quoting the local governorate. Television footage showed black smoke rising from the mangled truck and the three-story police station gutted from the powerful explosion.

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The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a militant group which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy and has been involved in nearly daily clashes with security forces since a ceasefire collapsed more than a year ago.

There will be “no [Kurdish] corridor”, Biden said, in a press conference with Prime Minister Yildirim.

“Turkey will never allow these extremists to realize their dirty aims”, Erdogan said in a statement.

Turkey sent more tanks into northern Syria on Thursday and gave Syrian Kurdish forces a week to scale back their presence near the Turkish border, a day after it launched a US -backed cross-border incursion to establish a. It said the blast had been carried out by the PKK.

Yemen’s foreign ministry condemned the attack, according to the country’s official news agency SABA.

Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a consultancy, warned Ankara’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria was likely to exacerbate its long-running tensions with the PKK and could invite further attacks from Isis. The rebel leader has been denied visits since April 2015, as a peace process between the PKK and the government began to falter.

Cizre has borne the brunt of renewed violence between the outlawed PKK and government forces since the collapse of a ceasefire previous year.

A strict round-the-clock curfew between December and March brought the town to a standstill as security forces fought street battles with PKK militants and their sympathizers, in the course of which many buildings were destroyed.

The death toll from blast in southeastern Turkey has risen to 11.

All of the dead are believed to be police officers while three of the injured after civilians.

Kurdish forces “must move back across the Euphrates River”. Human rights groups say hundreds of civilians have also been killed.

The attack comes as turmoil between the Government and the PKK, which is considered as a terrorist organization in Turkey, continues.

Last week Erdogan accused followers of a US-based Islamic cleric he blames for the July 15 coup attempt of being complicit in attacks by Kurdish militants.

Turkey says the United States is legally bound by a treaty to immediately hand over Fethullah Gulen, the USA -based Muslim cleric it accuses of plotting to overthrow Turkey’s government.

The PKK also said it was behind an attack on Thursday in the northeastern province of Artvin on a convoy carrying the leader of the main opposition Republican People´s Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

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Turkey on Friday sent four more tanks over the border, said an AFP photographer at Karkamis on the Turkish side of the frontier. Doing so may result in civil and/or criminal penalties.

Nine dead, dozens wounded in blast at police headquarters in southeast Turkey