Turkey’s air force hit Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq yesterday, hours after a suicide vehicle bombing in the capital killed 37 people, heightening tensions with the militants.
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Turkey has obtained “very serious and nearly certain” findings that point to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group having carried out the attack, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
A senior official said the attack was carried out by two Kurdish bombers.
“These attacks, which threaten our country’s integrity and our nation’s unity and solidarity, do not weaken our resolve in fighting terrorism but bolster our determination”, President Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement.
The developments come as Ankara has been imposing curfews in several mainly-Kurdish towns in its southeast since August a year ago.
The U.S. condemned the Ankara attack, with State Department spokesman John Kirby saying in a statement, “We reaffirm our strong partnership with our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally Turkey in combating the shared threat of terrorism”.
“And we also want to pray for the ordinary people of Turkey who bear the brunt of these attacks”.
“The Ankara blast is a step against Turkey’s anti-terror operations against the PKK, DHKP-C and Daesh”.
Turkey’s military offensive against its own Kurdish citizens and its involvement in ongoing airstrikes within Iraq and Syria has thrust the country into a delicate geopolitical and national security situation involving various regional actors.
On Monday, Turkish security officials told Reuters and other news agencies that the attackers, male and female, were linked to the PKK.
Sunday’s attack, tearing through a crowded transport hub a few hundred metres (yards) from the Justice and Interior Ministries, was the second such strike at the administrative heart of the city in under a month.
The government said almost 700 PKK guerrillas were killed, though that figure is strongly disputed by rebels, who claimed that over 120 civilians were killed in military attacks targeting private homes in Kurdish cities.
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The PKK is considered by Turkey to be a terrorist group. Anadolu said an operation in Nusaybin, on the border with Syria, began on Monday, while tanks were deployed for another operation in the town of Yuksekova, near the border with Iraq. A fragile peace process between the PKK and the Turkish state collapsed in July, reigniting a battle that has cost tens of thousands of lives since 1984.
