Kurdish militant group TAK claims responsibility for Ankara bombing

Turkey has also been helping efforts led by the USA to combat ISIL in neighbouring Syria, and has faced several deadly bombings in the past year that were blamed on the extremist group.

“Fourteen people have been detained”, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday, according to the Anadalou Agency.

The TAK is a group that split from the Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2004 because it regarded their tactics as “too humane”.

The United States has said it does not consider the YPG a terrorist group.

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

A auto laden with explosives was detonated next to military buses as they waited at traffic lights in the administrative heart of Ankara on Wednesday. The Turkish military stated that a high-level meeting of PKK members was taking place at the time, adding that the strikes had killed around 70 people.

Bulent Aliriza, a Turkey expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that few had heard of TAK before December 2015, when the group said it was responsible for a mortar attack at an airport in Istanbul that killed one and injured one. Most of those killed were military personnel, clearly the target of this attack.

The Kurdish militia, however, has been most effective in the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region-Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, claimed US Secretary of State John Kerry has agreed with Ankara’s position that Kurdish forces in Syria can not be trusted. The perpetrator is the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union (PYD) and the YPG.

“We have conducted no military attack and the ones who know it the best are the Turkish army and AKP government”.

In their Friday statement, TAK also named Abdulbaki Sonmez from eastern Turkey as the suicide bomber, contradicting the official version which identified the attacker as the Syrian national Salih Neccar. Turkey has also reinforced its 900-km long border with Syria with concrete fencing.

President Erdogan said he would tell President Barack Obama that U.S. weapons had helped Syrian Kurds attack civilians.

Davutoğlu criticized the USA for supporting Kurdish militias in the mission against the Islamic State.

Earlier, Syrian Kurds from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which is backed by the United States in its war against the Islamic State group, denied any involvement in the Ankara bombing.