In October, suicide bombings blamed on IS targeted a peace rally outside the main train station in Ankara, killing 102 people in Turkey’s deadliest attack in years.
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Wednesday’s bomb attack on a military convoy in Ankara was the fifth on Turkish soil in less than a year, bringing an unprecedented level of conflict to a country that, once upon a time, stood out for its relative tranquillity compared to its politically tumultuous neighbours.
Anadolu Agency said Thursday that the rebels detonated a bomb on a road linking the cities of Diyarbakir and Bingol as a military vehicle was passing by.
“It has with certainty been revealed that this attack was carried out by members of the terrorist organisation in Turkey in cooperation with a YPG member who infiltrated from Syria”, Davutoglu tells reporters.
Mr Davutoglu said Turkish intelligence had established where the militants had crossed into Turkey and how their networks were organised.
Turkey now has a strong relationship with Iraq’s Kurds, based on mutual strategic and commercial interests, despite its initial reluctance to acknowledge the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq.
People walk on the Syrian side of the Bab al-Salam border crossing with Turkey.
In Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory has reported ongoing fierce clashes between Arab opposition groups and Syrian Kurdish fighters in Kurdish-held neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud.
The attacks will increase tensions between Turkey and its allies over their relationship with Kurdish forces in Syria as Ankara wages parallel campaigns against ISIS and PKK rebels.
Turkey insists that the Syrian militias and the PKK are the same and both are terror groups. They now seek control over Azaz itself, and then hope to move east so as to hook up with the other two Kurdish cantons, forming a contiguous Kurdish state along the border with Turkey, which they call Rojava. The Turkish security forces have been engaged in large-scale operations against Kurdish militants in the southeast since December, imposing controversial curfews in flashpoint areas, and the fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians.
Turkey fears Kurdish gains along its border will morph into an autonomous state and inspire similar ambitions among its own Kurdish minority. However, the YPG denied any involvement in the bombing. Syrian government forces are working in tandem with the Syrian Kurds to flush out Islamic State and rebels from the country’s north, he said in an interview.
Davutoglu said: “The attack was carried out by the PKK together with a person who sneaked into Turkey from Syria”, referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK.
Turkish military also conducted airstrikes against several PKK targets in northern Iraq.
“Fourteen people have been detained”, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday, according to the Anadalou Agency.
The YPG has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.
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The rush hour car-bomb attack on Wednesday evening targeting buses carrying military personnel killed 28 people and injured dozens of others as Turkey grapples with an array of issues, including renewed fighting with the Kurdish rebels, the threat from Islamic State militants and the Syria refugee crisis.
