ISTANBUL // Eleven Turkish police officers were killed and dozens more wounded on Friday, when a suicide truck bombing struck near a police building in the country’s south-east.
The attack was claimed by the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and came two days after the Turkish army launched an offensive in Syria aimed at both ISIL and a Syrian Kurdish militia detested by Ankara.
Friday’s blast tore the facade off the headquarters of the Turkish riot police in the town of Cizre, a bastion of PKK support just north of the Syrian border.
The local governor’s office said 78 people were injured, three of them civilians. Four people were said to be in critical condition.
The state-run Anadolu news agency said the explosion went off at a control post, 50 metres from the building.
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 ceasefire last year.
Turkish security forces have been hit by near daily PKK attacks since a two-and-a-half year truce with the state collapsed in July 2015, with hundreds of police officers and soldiers killed.
Turkey’s operation in Syria aims to push both ISIL and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia that is fighting the extremists 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.
On Friday, the army sent four more tanks over the border.
Kurdish activists have accused Turkey of being more intent on preventing Syrian Kurds creating a stronghold than fighting ISIL.
But on Friday prime minister Binali Yildirim denounced as a “barefaced lie” suggestions in Western media that the Syria operation was singling out Kurds.
“They either know nothing about the world or else their job is to report a barefaced lie,” he said.
Ankara’s hostility to the Syrian Kurdish fighters has put it at odds with its Nato ally, the United States, which supports the YPG in the fight against ISIL.
On Wednesday, Turkish tanks and fighter jets helped pro-Turkish rebels push ISIL from the town of Jarabulus, which the YPG appeared to have wanted to capture also.
The next day, Turkey shelled Kurdish fighters in the area, saying they were failing to observe a deal with the US to stop advancing west into ISIL-held territory.
Anadolu quoted security sources as saying the military would continue to intervene against the Syrian Kurdish fighters until they began to retreat.
In a separate incident on the border, three Turkish soldiers were injured by mortar shells fired from Syria that landed in the district of Yayladagi, Turkey’s Dogan news agency reported.
Dogan said there had been clashes between local Turkmen and Syrian regime forces in Latakia, from where the shells were fired.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin – who until late June had been locked in a bitter feud over the shooting down of a Russian war plane – agreed to step up efforts to ensure aid reached Syria’s conflict-torn northern Aleppo province.
The two also emphasised the need to fight “all terror groups” in Syria, Anadolu said.
Visiting Turkey on Wednesday, US vice president Joe Biden said Washington had warned the YPG not to move west of the Euphrates river after recent advances, or risk losing American support.
Murat Karayilan, one of the top Iraq-based leaders of the PKK, accused Turkey of doing a deal with ISIL to vacate Jarabulus.
“ISIS has never abandoned a town in one day without putting up a fight,” he told the pro-PKK Firat news agency, using another acronym for ISIL.
The PKK has kept up its assaults following the failed coup attempt on July 15 by rogue elements in the military aimed at unseating Mr Erdogan.
The government for its part has vowed to press on with the campaign to eradicate the PKK from eastern Turkey.
Over the past year, the military has conducted operations and imposed punishing curfews in towns and cities in the south-east that have killed civilians, including in Cizre.
* Agence France-Presse
