Turkey hits Kurdish groups in Syria, Iraq

Turkish fighter jets carried out dozens of air strikes in northern Syria and Iraq on Sunday, in what Turkish officials called an antiterrorism campaign to root out militants they accused of orchestrating a deadly bomb attack last week in Istanbul.

“The scoundrels are being held accountable for the treacherous attacks!” the Turkish Defense Ministry wrote on Twitter early Sunday. The strikes targeted shelters, tunnels, ammunition dumps and training camps, the ministry said.

More than two dozen people were killed, but different groups gave conflicting casualty numbers.

The Kurdish-led militia that administers northeastern Syria said 14 civilians and one fighter had been killed. The group, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, vowed to strike back against Turkey.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group that tracks the conflict through contacts inside Syria, said the dead included one civilian, 14 SDF fighters and 12 soldiers from the government of President Bashar Assad of Syria.

The new violence was a sharp increase in tensions between forces that have long hated each other — and both have close relationships with the United States.

In Syria, the United States worked with the SDF to fight the Islamic State group. But that partnership has enraged Turkey, a U.S. ally in NATO, which views Syria’s Kurdish fighters as part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has fought an insurgency against the Turkish state for decades, aimed at greater independence or autonomy.

After a bombing that killed six people and injured dozens more on a busy pedestrian avenue in Istanbul on Nov. 13, Turkish authorities released photos of a woman they said had planted the bomb and accused her of working for the PKK. Dozens of other suspects have been arrested.

The SDF in Syria and the PKK’s military wing have both denied any involvement in the Istanbul bombing.

In a statement Sunday, the Turkish Defense Ministry said its warplanes had hit 89 targets in northern Iraq and Syria.

Also struck Sunday was a pediatric hospital being built near the Syrian city of Kobani, health officials said.

Niranjan Shrestha/Associated Press Election workers check voter records during parliamentary balloting at a polling station in Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu.