Five killed in Turkey auto bombing

After a historic peace between the Turkish state and Kurds broke down previous year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been increasingly forceful with the Turkish Kurds.

Turkey insists that the Syrian militias and the PKK are the same and both are terror groups. Turkey so far has refused to let them in, despite being urged to do so by the United Nations and European nations, but is sending aid to Syrian refugee camps right across the border.

The U.S. also discouraged the YPG from making such advances on Tuesday.

But Washington has relied heavily on the Syrian Kurds in the battle against the Islamic State group and has rejected Turkish pressure.

Turkish artillery in the south of the country shelled positions of Kurdish fighters in Syria for the fifth day in a row on Wednesday in an escalating standoff, reports said.

Bystrom said Thursday “we have been in touch” with Sweden’s security police about the blast in Fittja, a suburb with a large immigrant population.

There were no other claims of responsibility including from the Islamic State that has bombed the city in the past.

The vehicle bomb went off late Wednesday in Turkey’s capital during evening rush hour.

The attack came at a tense time when the Turkish government is facing an array of challenges.

Turkey has been shelling YPG positions in northern Syria recently, targeting the group around Azaz in Aleppo province amid an uptick in Kurdish military gains in the region.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official told the Associated Press that the ambassadors of Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S. were invited to the ministry separately and were being briefed on the attack.

The co-leader of the PKK umbrella group, Cemil Bayik, was quoted by the Firat news agency as saying he did not know who was responsible for the Ankara bombing.

And, days ahead of a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria set to take effect Friday, Erdogan warned of a strong Turkish response, raising the specter of an escalation of strikes against the YPG across the Syrian border.

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

The reinforcements did not include fighters from the hardline Nusra Front or other jihadist groups, he said.

The Turkish capital Ankara was targeted by twin suicide bombings on October 10, when 103 people were killed in an attack on protesters gathering outside the city’s main train station for a peace rally.

“It has been determined with certainty that this attack was carried out by members of the separatist terror organization together with a member of the YPG who infiltrated from Syria”, Davutoglu said, identifying the Ankara bomber as Salih Neccar.

On Sunday, the Syrian government said Turkish forces were among 100 gunmen who had entered Syria accompanied by 12 pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, in an ongoing supply operation to insurgents.

A auto laden with explosives detonated next to the military buses as they waited at traffic lights near Turkey’s armed forces’ headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara late on Wednesday. The Turkish jets attacked PKK positions in northern Iraq’s Haftanin region, hitting the rebels, which it said included a number of senior PKK leaders. It said the raids were conducted on Wednesday night.

An ambulances arrives as security officials close the main roads around an explosion site in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016, after assailants exploded a auto bomb near vehicles carrying military personnel in the Tur…