Turkey says Kurdish bomber trained in Syria
Suicide attacker alleged to be member of PKK
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey on Tuesday identified the attacker who carried out a deadly suicide bombing in Ankara as a 24-year-old woman who allegedly became a Kurdish rebel in 2013 and had trained in Syria.
An Interior Ministry statement identified the suicide car bomber blamed for killing 37 people, including herself, on Sunday as Seher Cagla Demir. A possible male accomplice, who was also killed, has not yet been identified.
The statement said Demir joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, then crossed into Syria and received what it called “terror training” from an allied Syrian Kurdish militia.
Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish militia — known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG — as a terror organization because of its affiliation with the PKK and has been pressing the United States to stop helping the group. Washington considers the PKK a terrorist organization but has backed the YPG, which has been effective in fighting the Islamic State group.
Turkey had blamed the Syrian Kurdish militia force for a Feb. 17 bombing in Ankara that killed 29 people, saying the group had acted in concert with the PKK. But a Turkey-based Kurdish militant group that is an offshoot of the PKK later claimed that attack. No group has yet claimed Sunday’s attack in the capital.
The attack escalated tensions with the Kurds and further complicated Turkey’s place in the region as it battles a host of enemies across its borders including the Syrian government, Kurdish rebels in both Iraq and Syria, and the Islamic State group.
Turkey also has been forced to absorb 2.7 million refugees from the war in Syria, and Europe is pressing to return thousands more migrants back to Turkey.
Turkey’s air force carried out retaliatory airstrikes Monday against suspected PKK targets in northern Iraq, including on the Qandil mountains where the group’s leadership is based. On Tuesday, the military said those airstrikes killed at least 45 Kurdish rebels — a claim that could not independently be verified.
Turkish authorities, meanwhile, imposed a round-theclock curfew and entry ban in the Baglar neighbourhood of Diyarbakir, in the country’s mainly Kurdish southeast region. Kurdish militants there set cars on fire overnight, triggering clashes that left one police officer and three Kurdish militants dead.
Turkey this week also declared 24-hour curfews and launched operations against Kurdish militants in the southeast towns of Nusaybin and Yuksekova and in the city of Sirnak.