A auto bomb rocked the eastern Turkish city of Van today, leaving 19 people including two police officers wounded, a ruling party lawmaker said.
Advertisement
Turkish news agency Dogan has quoted local police who said initial reports suggest it was a vehicle bomb.
Turkey should revive a peace process to end three-decades of conflict with Kurdish militants, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan said, in comments relayed by his brother on Monday.
Protests erupted in southeastern Turkey after the government sacked about two dozen elected mayors from Kurdish-run municipalities on Sunday (11 September) and replaced them with new ones.
“But the dynamic changed during Turkey’s most recent elections in June 2015, when the Kurds-liberal, conservative, and nationalist alike-coalesced around the Kurdish-nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)”, he said.
“It is a step taken too late in my opinion”.
Turkey has a “binding duty” to defeat the Islamic State in neighboring Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an address Sunday.
Turkey’s army and global coalition forces on Wednesday started an operation to drive Islamic State jihadists out of a key Syrian border town, a statement from the Turkish prime minister’s office said. “Our government took this decision based on all of this evidence”.
The Anadolu agency said the explosion occurred Monday morning on the first day of Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holiday. “You, as mayors and municipal councils, can not stand up and support terrorist organisations”, he told reporters after prayers outside an Istanbul mosque, shortly before the attack.
Advertisement
Ahmet Budak, an AK Party politician who was an unsuccessful candidate in parliamentary elections last November, was gunned down in the Semdinli district of Hakkari province close to the borders with Iran and Iraq, security sources said. Twelve of the mayors have been arrested, its statement said. The mayors, mainly in the southeast, were linked to the July 15 attempted coup, the ministry said.
