Russian ambassador in Turkey says PKK not a terrorist organization

“Why? How many followers would IS have in Turkey, a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand?” The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East and have a population numbering between 25 and 35 million primarily inhabiting southeast Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq, and western Iran. But Washington has supported YPG fighters as an effective force in combating Islamic State.

How could Turkey’s massive secret police, and in turn government, not have known when seemingly all of the Turkish media knew?

These unions called a two-day strike October. 12-13 in response to the massacre.

Meanwhile, 10.5 percent of respondents said that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was responsible for the blasts, 10.6 percent blamed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan directly and 10.1 percent thought it was the pro-Kurdish, left wing People’s Democratic Party (HDP).

Demonstrators in Istanbul and the capital Ankara expressed anger and dismay at the authorities, saying they abandoned the civilians attending the peace demonstration who bore the brunt of the bomb attacks for the sake of state security, according to IBTimes UK.

“I believe the state organized the explosion”, Ali Sogut, 32, a former Soma miner who was at the protest, told the Militant. YPG forces are accused by Turkey of “trying to capture land between Jarablus and Azaz, going west of the Euphrates”, something Ankara “will never accept”.

So far no group has taken credit for the bombing. A report in Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to the government, claimed DNA samples were being compared to those obtained from families of extremists authorities suspect could have carried out the attacks, said Fox News.

But as Turkey’s contract negotiations with China Precision Manufacturing Import-Export Corp. failed to produce results, Western bidders [a United States team of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and Europe’s Eurosam] have come back into the picture.

“Police teams showed up soon after the blast, as if they had already been prepared in advance”, Nursel Demir, district co-chair of the HDP in Mezitli, told Firat News.

If such a conflict starts (and I hope that I am wrong), Turkey will split in the middle, and all citizens will lose, including the Kurds, liberals, leftists, conservatives and Erdogan himself. A similar rally in Istanbul three days later attracts over 100,000.

At least 30 people were killed and 126 wounded, the interior ministry said in a statement giving the first official toll.

This is the burden of Simon Tisdall′s otherwise insightful commentary on the Ankara attacks in “The Guardian” which points to the Islamic State, the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves or other right-wing groups within Turkey′s security apparatus as the most likely culprits. As a rule, events of such magnitude unite the leaders of the global community to fight the common threat; contacts are intensified, and mutual recriminations are relegated to the background.

To give you an idea of the complexity, since the heinous terrorist attack on pro-Kurdish activists in Turkey last week, fingers have been pointed in multiple directions.