Turkey blames Kurdish rebels for Ankara attack

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.

Davutoglu said the attack was the result of a collaboration between “the PKK together with a person (Necar) who sneaked into Turkey from Syria”.

“We are completely refuting that”, Saleh Muslim, co-chair of the PYD, told Reuters by phone.

Turkish artillery has been shelling PYD and YPG positions along its border in Syria, apparently concerned by recent gains by the militias in the area.

The UAE has condemned a terrorist vehicle bomb attack that targeted military buses near the armed forces’ headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the Turkish capital Ankara.

The leader of the main Syrian Kurdish group has denied that his group is behind the Turkey blasts and warns Ankara against taking Syria ground action. “We stand with our Turkish allies in the face of this horrific act, which only strengthens our resolve to deepen our ongoing cooperation in the fight against terrorism”, Carter said.

It has aided the PYD, the Syrian-based Kurds, because it has fought reliably against the Islamic State group.

The group most recently claimed responsibility for a mortar attack at Istanbul’s second airport in December that left an aircraft cleaner dead.

An SDF official said Turkish troops are bombing their positions in border areas, inflicting casualties among civilians. It said he had been registered as a refugee in Turkey.

“The Turkish population, regardless of how polarised it is on domestic issues, on the Kurdish issue they are united…that the Kurdish groups fighting Turkey should be dealt with [using] force”, Elshayyal said.

“Our determination to respond in kind against such attacks against our unity and future from outside and inside is even more strengthened through such attacks”, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement, according to CNN.

The bombing prompted Davutoglu to scrap a planned trip to Brussels yesterday to discuss Europe’s migrant crisis. And both are part of the broad coalition fighting the Islamic State. “Turkey, like every other nation around the world that is under the threat of terrorist attacks, has every right to try to do what it has to do to protect its people from those attacks”.

A collapsed ceasefire with the PKK back after two years of relative peace in July has sparked a flare-up of violence, attacks and government crackdowns.

Ankara has been on high alert since October, when 103 people were killed in a suicide attack on a crowd of peace activists, the bloodiest attack in the country’s modern history.

Turkey reeled Wednesday from a deadly bombing of a military convoy in the capital, plunging its leaders deeper into crisis mode and underscoring the country’s vulnerability to the Syrian war and revitalized Kurdish insurgency.