Russian Federation has promised to protect Kurdish fighters in Syria in case of a ground offensive by Turkey, a move that would lead to a “big war”, the Syrian group’s envoy to Moscow said in an interview on Wednesday.
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Turkey’s leaders say a Syrian national who was a member of a Syrian Kurdish militia group carried out the suicide auto bombing on Wednesday evening in collaboration with Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization. The suspect was identified as Salih Necar and was believed to have entered Turkey along with Syrian refugees.
The YPG is the armed wing of the PYD, another Kurdish separatist group based in Syria, and Turkey sees it as an affiliate of the PKK.
The attacks will increase tensions between Turkey and its allies over their relationship with Kurdish forces in Syria as Ankara wages parallel campaigns against ISIS and PKK rebels. “They don’t consider Turkey an enemy”, he said. “It would be unusual for the PKK… to mount an “out-of-territory” operation, in this case attacking the heart of the Turkish state”, it says.
In an apparent reference to the U.S., Davutoglu called on allies to stop its support for the Syrian Kurdish group.
There have been no reports of any Malaysian casualties in yesterday’s vehicle bomb attack in Ankara, Turkey, the Malaysian Foreign Ministry confirmed.
Turkey has in the last months waged an all-out assault on the PKK, which launched an insurgency against the Turkish state in 1984, fighting for greater autonomy and rights for the country’s largest ethnic minority.
The PKK is allied to the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria, which has been under intense Turkish bombardment as it makes advances on Aleppo. ISIS was still useful, to wear down the Syrian army and keep the Iraqi government off-balance and dependent on the United States.
A terror attack was carried out in Ankara Feb. 17 near the buildings of the Turkish parliament, the general staff and a military dorm in the city. The statement said YPG is not engaged in any military activity against neighbouring states or other forces.
“YPG is a pawn of the Syrian regime and the regime is directly responsible for the Ankara attack”. The U.S. already lists the PKK as a terror group.
Six soldiers of the Turkish security forces were killed Thursday when a bomb hit a military vehicle in southeastern Diyarbakir province, local NTV reported. Hundreds of people have been killed in renewed fighting following the collapse of the peace process and tens of thousands have been displaced.
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Those attacks were blamed on Islamic State, as were two other deadly bombings in the country’s Kurdish-dominated south-east in 2015.
