Eleven officers killed as Kurdish group bombs Turkish police HQ
THE outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party yesterday claimed responsibility for a suicide truck bombing on a police building in the south-east of Turkey that killed 11 officers and wounded dozens more.
The blast, early yesterday, came two days after the country’s army launched an offensive in Syria that the Turkish government says is not only aimed against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) but also against a Syrian Kurdish militia detested by Ankara.
The bomb tore the facade off the headquarters of the Turkish riot police in the town of Cizre, a bastion of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) support just north of the Syrian border. The local governor’s office said 11 officers were killed and 78 people injured, including three civilians. Four people were said to be in a critical condition.
The PKK said it carried out the assault in retaliation for the “continued isolation” of the group’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and the “lack of information” about his welfare. Cizre, a majority Kurdish town, has been badly hit by renewed violence between the PKK and government forces since the collapse of a two-and-a-half year ceasefire last year.
Turkey’s operation in Syria aims to push both Isil and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia that is fighting the jihadists out of the border region.
Ankara considers the YPG, which has links to the PKK, as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous Kurdish region on Turkey’s border. But Binali Yildirim, the prime minister, yesterday denounced as a “barefaced lie” suggestions in Western media that the Syria operation was singling out Kurds.
Murat Karayilan, one of the top Iraqbased leaders of the PKK, accused Tur- key of doing a deal with Isil to vacate the Syrian border city of Jarabulus. “Isis (Isil) has never abandoned a town in one day without putting up a fight,” he told the pro-PKK Firat news agency.
More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority.