Turkish troops killed in remote-controlled mine attack

Turkey launched the offensive against the Kurdish fighters about a week ago, which effectively ended fragile peace talks, following a rise in deadly violence in the country.

Three more Turkish soldiers were killed in the latest assault blamed on Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, as Ankara pressed on with a relentless air campaign against hideouts in northern Iraq.

The PKK has stepped up its strikes on Turkish security forces in the past two weeks, as Turkish warplanes bombed its positions in northern Iraq.

And if Turkey keeps going after PKK while not trying to provoke ISIS, “it will leave the US without a Syria strategy”, Bremmer said. Half a year later, an IS suicide bomber murdered 32 people in an attack against a pro-Kurdish gathering, in a Turkish town bordering Syria. Ankara is concerned that the Syrian Kurds will establish an autonomous region along Turkey’s border and encourage Kurdish separatism among PKK supporters in Turkey.

The Turkish Energy minister said the PKK had sabotaged the Shah Deniz pipeline, carrying natural gas from Azerbaijan, days after attacking an oil pipeline pumping crude to Turkey from Iraq.

Turkey’s covert relationship with the IS, which has captured larges swaths of land in Syria and Iraq since last summer and declared an Islamic Sharia caliphate in the lands it controls, can be described by words ranging from “clandestine support” to “distant Islamist comradeship”, and from “malign neglect” to “defensive caution”.

“The ministry stresses Turkey’s need to act immediately to eliminate this threat, especially after the brutal Syrian regime’s atrocities led to the growth of these organisations that now pose a serious threat to global peace and security”, Qatar said in the statement carried by the Qatar News Agency (QNA). The PKK retaliated by attacking police posts and killing some policemen.

With regard to the complaint that the Turkish border is the entry point for numerous volunteers, many of them Westerners, who are traveling to Syria to join the jihadists, the envoy said that his country has “stopped more than 16,000 people” from doing so.

“Such an attitude against Turkey’s determined struggle against terror – based on global law – is impossible to understand given that the Iraqi government has openly declared that it is not able to prevent the terrorist attacks of PKK on Turkey and its citizens from its territory”, the statement said.

Shortly before the air strike, two soldiers were killed when the military vehicle they were travelling in was hit by a blast from a remote controlled homemade mine planted by the PKK in neighbouring Sirnak province, the army said.