The renewed violence comes as tensions are running high between Ankara and Turkey’s Kurdish minority and as the U.S. and Turkey are working on a new plan to battle Islamic State group fighters in Syria, which shares a border with Turkey.
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In an earlier attack in Sultanbeyli on Monday, a van laden with explosives detonated outside a police station around 1am, with a fire following the blast collapsing part of the three-storey building.
Assailants later fired on police inspecting the scene of the explosion, sparking a gunfight that killed a police officer and two assailants.
Police arrested a female suspect who was reportedly wounded and hid in a building following the attack, Turkish broadcaster NTV said.
The group previously claimed a 2013 suicide attack on the US embassy in the capital, Ankara.
Four Turkish police officers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in the southeastern Silopi district of the Sirnak province bordering Iraq and Syria blamed on Kurdish militants, Turkish media said.
The Turkish prime minister noted in the interview that it is necessary to create “an area where civilians can stay without any fear of being attacked and killed” in Syria. A Twitter account believed to be managed by a group called the People’s Defense Union (Halkların Savunması Birliği) claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday.
In further violence yesterday, Kurdish rebels in the southeastern province of Sirnak fired at a helicopter carrying conscripts who either had finished their term of duty or were taking leave, killing one of them and injuring another, the military said. The U.S. Department of State tweeted that there were “no injuries to Consulate personnel or customers”.
A ceasefire in Turkey’s long-running conflict with the group disintegrated in July, when a suicide bombing blamed on IS killed 32 people in the predominantly Kurdish town of Suruc.
The Turkish General Staff also offered its condolence to the victim’s family in the statement.
“The attacks in Istanbul amount to a strong signal that the government’s crackdown on militant groups, including the PKK and the leftist DHKP-C, will not go unpunished”, said Nihat Ali Ozcan, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara.
The PKK’s military wing killed two Turkish police officers, claiming they had collaborated with IS in the bombing, and in response Turkey began bombing PKK camps in northern Iraq at the same time as launching air strikes on IS militants in Syria. The government considers the PKK a terrorist organization just like the Islamic State, as do various Western countries. A series of attacks this past weekend shocked Turkey.
According to an AFP toll, 29 members of the security forces have been killed in violence linked to the PKK since the current crisis began.
The Marxist-inspired PKK has waged a three decade insurgency since 1984 for greater autonomy for Turkey’s Kurds that has left tens of thousands dead.
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And we started by talking about the attack today on the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul.
