Gunmen attack US consulate

Turkey’s largest city Istanbul was Monday shaken by twin attacks on the US consulate and a police station as tensions spiral amid the government’s air campaign against Kurdish militants.

Turkish broadcaster NTV said that a female suspect has been arrested.

The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Ankara, the United States and European Union, launched its fight in 1984 to press for greater autonomy in the Southeast.

On the other side of Istanbul, a vehicle laden with explosives was used to attack a police station, injuring three police officers and seven civilians, police said.

Exchanges then continued throughout the night as other militants fired on the police station.

Turkish forensic police officers work at the site of an explosion at a police station in Istanbul’s Sultanbeyli neighbourhood, early Monday, August 10, 2015.

According to reports by Doğan News Agency, the director of the bomb disposal team, Beyazıt Çeken was killed during the clashes.

Two assailants, a woman and a man, opened fire on the US diplomatic mission in Istanbul’s Sariyer district.

The far-leftist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Army-Front, whose members are among those detained in recent weeks, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the US embassy in Ankara in 2013 which killed a Turkish security guard.

The consulate has been closed to public until further notice, said a written statement released on the consulate’s twitter account.

At least 37 people have been killed inside Turkey since the violence reignited after a two-year ceasefire which put a pause on a three-decades long civil war. – Reuters pic’Turkey protecting IS’.

The violence has left a peace process with the PKK, initiated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2012, in tatters.

Senior PKK figure Cemil Bayik told the BBC in an interview today that Turkey was trying to protect IS by fighting the PKK, who are bitterly opposed to the jihadists.

“Politicians who asked for people’s votes to produce solutions must immediately come together to resolve Turkey’s biggest problem”, he said.

Last week, a US drone carried out its first strike on Islamic State from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey’s southern province of Adana as part of a joint effort to clamp down on a porous 70-mile stretch of the 565-mile Turkish-Syrian border that the jihadist organisation controls.

Washington has long been pushing its historically Turkey to step up the fight against IS, something Ankara had been reluctant to do.