The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) yesterday claimed a suicide truck bombing on a police building in Turkey’s southeast that killed 11 officers and wounded dozens more.
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The ministry reiterated Qatar’s rejection of violence and terrorism in all their forms and manifestations, whatever their motives and causes.
The blast tore the facade off the headquarters of the riot police in the town of Cizre, a bastion of PKK support north of the Syrian border.
Eleven police officers were killed and 78 people injured, three of them civilians, the statement added. Four people were said to be in critical condition.
Turkey has also seen a rise of deadly attacks that have been blamed on Islamic State militants, including a suicide bombing at a Kurdish wedding in south-east Turkey last week that killed 54 people and an attack on Istanbul’s main airport in June, which killed 44.
The latter released a statement on their military wing website stating that the attack in Cizre was for the ongoing isolation of their leader Abdullah Ocalan at a prison on an island off Istanbul.
Violence between the PKK and the security forces resumed a year ago, after the collapse of a fragile peace process. The operation aims to help Syrian rebels retake Jarablus, a key IS-held border town, and to contain the expansion of Syrian Kurdish militia who are linked to the PKK.
One gendarme was killed in the attack. Hundreds of security force members, militants and even civilians have been killed since. It comes a week after a suicide attack against the Kurdish community during a wedding in the neighbor city of Gaziantep, where 54 people were killed, majority children.
Anadolu quoted security sources as saying that the military would continue to intervene against the Syrian Kurdish fighters until they began to retreat.
Especially because the two nations who have been most against Turkey joining the alliance, France, and Germany, are the ones that have been most affected by terrorist attacks; meaning that it will probably still be a long time before Turkey can be one of the European Union members.
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Cizre is in Sirnak, a province that borders both Syria and Iraq and has a largely Kurdish population. More than 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have died since the rebels took up arms in Turkey in 1984.
