Kurdish militant group claims Ankara auto bomb attack

A auto bomb went off in the Turkish capital Wednesday near vehicles carrying military personnel, killing at least 28 people and wounding 61 others, officials said.

In addition to the president, Turkey’s foreign minister has accused the United States of making conflicting statements about the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish militia group accused of planting a bomb that killed at least 28 people in Ankara this week.

Twenty of the dead were Turkish soldiers, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday.

The group claimed that the perpetrator of the Ankara attack was Abdulbaki Sonmez, born in eastern Van province of Turkey.

The PYD has denied involvement in the attack and the USA has said it is unable to confirm or deny the Turkish allegation. The Turkish government and the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group, have been locked in a decades-long armed conflict in the country’s southeast, punctuated only by a handful of failed cease-fires. Most recently, TAK had claimed a mortar attack in December at Istanbul’s second airport that killed a cleaner.

In turn, Syrian Kurds denied responsibility and blamed Islamic State militants (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) for the attack.

Erdogan said 14 people have been detained in relation to the attack, and he expects that number to grow.

Ankara had blamed a US-backed Syrian Kurdish militia group for the attack, saying it acted in collaboration with the PKK.

The State Department, which sees the Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters as useful allies against Islamic State, said the United States had “not provided any weapons of any kind” to the group.

The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks, despite severing its ties with the PKK, has also been labeled a terrorist organization by the US and Turkey.

Hours later and more than 2,000 miles away in what may have been a sympathy attack, an explosion severely damaged a Turkish cultural association building in a Stockholm suburb.

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

“At the moment, I have difficulty in understanding America, which still hasn’t called or still can not call the PYD and the YPG as terrorists and which says, ‘Our support for the YPG will continue, ‘” Erdogan said Wednesday. Obama also offered his condolences for deadly terrorist attack in Turkey this week, it said. Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters during a visit to Turkey’s chief of military staff that the Syrian man, who he identified as Sahih Neccar, had carried out the attack in cooperation with Turkey’s own outlawed Kurdish rebel group.