PM: Turkey to continue shelling Syria

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack which took place near the parliament and military headquarters.

According to preliminary information, three military and one private vehicles were hit in the attack and among the casualties are both servicemen and civilians.

However, the YPG, which has strong links to the PKK, has been fighting the Islamic State terror group, alongside the US.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official say the ambassadors of the five permanent U.N. Security Council member states have been invited to the ministry separately and are being briefed on the attack in Ankara which killed 28 people.

Forensic experts arrive near the site of last night’s explosion in Ankara, Turkey, February 18, 2016.

Turkey regards the Syrian Democratic Union Party (YPD), and its military wing, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as terrorists due to their affiliation to Turkey’s outlawed Kurdish rebel group.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday vowed a firm response to the attack, which he said exceeds “all moral and humane boundaries”.

“I’d like to warn Russian Federation, which is giving air support to the YPG in its advance on Azaz, not to use this terrorist group against the innocent people of Syria and Turkey”, he said.

The prime minister also stated that som 60-70 Kurdish militants, including senior PKK members, had been killed in airstrikes on Thursday.

It is part of a US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (Daesh) in neighbouring Syria and Iraq, and has been shelling Kurdish militia fighters in northern Syria in recent days. The blast was the second deadly bombing in Ankara in four months.

The president said that Turkey has an important role for peace in the world and such coward acts can not deter it from playing that role.

Erdogan insisted evidence obtained by the Turkish authorities pointed to the group.

Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to the government, said Thursday that the man who detonated the auto bomb Wednesday that targeted buses carrying military personnel was identified from his fingerprints.

Eleven people, all German tourists, were also killed on January 16 when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the tourist heart of Turkey’s biggest city Istanbul.

Six soldiers were killed and another was wounded Thursday in a roadside bombing that hit an armored military vehicle in the southeastern Turkish province of Diyarbakir, Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency reported, citing a statement from the Turkish General Staff. “What happened, once again, shows the need of a unity of all states in fight against global terrorism”.