Turkey cracks down in wake of deadly Istanbul bombings

ISTANBUL — Turkish authorities arrested more than 200 people Monday following suicide bombings near an Istanbul stadium that killed 44 people. The arrests primarily targeted members of a Kurdish political party that already was a focus of a broader government crackdown.

Saturday’s attack, which a radical Kurdish group claimed as an act of revenge for state violence against the ethnic minority in the southeast, was the deadliest to hit Istanbul this year.

Authorities blamed the carnage on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. A shadowy offshoot of the movement, which has waged a decadeslong insurgency against the state, claimed responsibility for the attack on a website that is blocked in Turkey.

“This is definitely a repercussion of the current crackdown on the Kurdish people,” said Cenk Sidar, president of Sidar Global Advisors, a risk advisory group in Washington. “It seems likely (PKK) will go ahead with these highcasualty, low-cost attacks for them, and it is a very dangerous trend in the country.”

Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group, faces a myriad of internal and external security threats.

The Turkish state is locked in conflict with Kurdish rebels in the southeast and militarily active across the border in Syria and Iraq. This year, it has seen a series of suicide bombings in major cities that were the work of either IS or Kurdish militants.

The Istanbul bombings also came as Turkish security forces and courts remained preoccupied with purging state institutions of the supporters of an exiled Islamist cleric whom Ankara accuses of staging a botched coup in July.

The scale of the purge, which has swept up government opponents of all stripes, has alarmed Western governments and leading civil and human rights groups.

Turkey’s Interior Ministry on Monday announced the detention of more than 235 people across 11 cities. Turkish media reports said most of those rounded up were members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a pro-Kurdish party that was elected to the Turkish Parliament in 2014.