No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but the Kurdistan Workers Party, also known as the PKK, is being blamed by Turkish media.
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Emergency services attend the scene after Kurdish militants attacked a police checkpoint in Cizre in southeast Turkey, Friday, Aug. 26, 2016, with an explosives-laden truck, killing several police officers and wounding dozens more, according to reports from the state-run Anadolu news agency.
Cizre, a majority Kurdish town, has been badly hit by renewed violence between the PKK and government forces since the collapse of a ceasefire previous year.
“Let our nation know that we have opened a total war against these terrorist groups”, Yildirim was quoted as saying by the Turkish Hurriyet newspaper.
The attack August 20, which killed 54 people, hit an outdoor wedding celebration in a conservative Kurdish neighborhood in the city of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border. “We grieve with the people of Turkey, our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally, and we reaffirm our shared commitment to defeating terrorism”. “The PKK/YPG and Islamic State seized the July 15 coup attempt as an opportunity”, Kurtulmus wrote. The Health Ministry sent 12 ambulances and two helicopters to the site.
Photographs broadcast by private channel NTV showed a large three-storey building reduced to its concrete shell, with no walls or windows, and surrounded by grey rubble.
On Wednesday, pro-Turkish Syrian rebels, backed by Turkish tanks and fighter jets, seized the border town of Jarabulus on which the YPG appeared to have designs.
The attack comes as turmoil between the Government and the PKK, which is considered as a terrorist organization in Turkey, continues.
More than 40,000 people have lost their lives in clashes with the PKK since 1984, when the group first started anti-government attacks.
Turkish troops fired on YPG fighters in northern Syria yesterday.
Also on Thursday, Interior Minister Efkan Ala accused the PKK of attacking a convoy carrying the country’s main opposition party leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which was the latest in a string of bombings targeting police or military vehicles and installations.
The country is still recovering from last month’s failed coup attempt that killed about 270 people, which government believes was influenced by US -based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.
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The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, has denied any involvement in and denounced the coup plot.
