Kurdish rebels kidnap 3 journalists in southeast Turkey

Turkey has blamed the YPG for the suicide auto bomb attack on Wednesday that killed 28 people, majority soldiers.

“Turkey will use its right to expand its rules of engagement beyond [responding to] actual attacks against it and to encompass all terror threats, including PYD and Daesh in particular”, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a UNESCO meeting in Istanbul.

The Anadolu Agency said the 14 are suspected of aiding a terror organisation, forging official documents and fraud.

The day after the bombing, which targeted military buses in Ankara, Davutoglu said the attack had been conducted jointly by an YPG member with PKK support.

“The situation we are now facing is one of legitimate defense”, Erdogan said Saturday.

President Barack Obama on Friday spoke to Erdogan in an 80-minute telephone call, sharing his concerns over the Syrian conflict and promising his support.

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

The border town of Nusaybin has been a hotspot in the fighting that flared up again between Turkish forces and the PKK after a fragile two-and-a-half year truce fell apart in July.

Last week, Erdogan vowed not to allow the creation of a Kurdish stronghold in northern Syria, saying there was no question of stopping the artillery barrage.

The Turkish forces have been shelling Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces, which Ankara views as a terrorist organization, as well as government troops on Syrian territory since mid-February.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu last week accused the United States of making conflicting statements about the Syrian Kurdish militia. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.

A splinter Kurdish militant group, the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks or TAK, has since claimed responsibility for the atrocity.