In a live television speech, Davutoglu said the bombing showed that the Syrian Kurdish YPG is a terrorist organisation and that Turkey expects cooperation from its allies against the group.
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“We have no doubt that Turkey would eliminate the scourge of terrorism with its strong will and unshakeable resolve”, the statement said. MSF said they made the decision not to provide the hospital’s Global Positioning System coordinates to the Syrian or Russian authorities on the request of local staff.
An explosion hit military vehicles at an intersection in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Wednesday evening, officials said, in what the military called a terror attack.
Several hours after the bombing, no group has claimed responsibility, leaving the door open for speculations and accusations.
Even giving Global Positioning System coordinates is no guarantee of protection, she said, citing a deadly US airstrike in October that destroyed a MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. While only “a small fraction of the health facilities in Syria”, those medical facilities recorded a total of 7,009 people dead and 154,647 people wounded a year ago.
The PKK, which has fought a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, has frequently attacked military targets in the past, although it has largely focussed its campaign on the mainly Kurdish southeast.
The head of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the political arm of the YPG, denied the Turkish allegations. The attack was the second deadly bombing in Ankara in four months.
Davutoğlu identified him as Sahih Neccar and explained that he carried out the operation with help from the PKK, a Kurdish Marxist-Leninist group dubbed a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and Europe.
Turkey’s armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, Davutoglu said, promising that those responsible would “pay the price”.
In a bid to up the diplomatic pressure on world powers to condemn the YPG, ambassadors from the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany were “invited” to the foreign ministry to receive a briefing on the bombing, an official told AFP.
The prime minister added: “I won’t give details now on where they come from and how they were organised, but we have all the information and will share it with all countries”.
Turkey fears Kurdish gains along its border will morph into an autonomous state and inspire similar ambitions among its own Kurdish minority.
Ankara’s residents, who were also in that area, were also injured.
Turkish artillery shelled positions of Kurdish fighters in Syria for the fifth day in a row on Wednesday in an escalating standoff, reports said.
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He allegedly has links to the YPG, the Kurdish fighting force in Syria.
