Suspected Car Bomb Kills at Least 5 Near Turkey Military HQ

Officials in Turkey are placing the blame for a deadly auto bomb blast in the nation’s capital of Ankara Wednesday on militant Kurds, saying the republic would retaliate for the suicide attack targeted at Turkish military staff.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in a speech on live television on Thursday that the perpetrator of the Ankara attack was a member of the Syria Kurdish YPG militia working with insurgents from the PKK.

“In light of information we have obtained, it has been clearly identified that this attack has been carried out by the members of terrorist organisation inside Turkey together with a YPG member individual who has crossed from Syria”, Davutoglu said.

It has also been battling militants in its own southeast from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have fought a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that 20 of those killed were military personnel.

He added he would speak to US President Barack Obama by phone later Friday to warn him over “the weapons support they (the United States) give to those organizations”, referring to the PYD and YPG. The latest one was the December mortar attack at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport that killed one man and damaged five aircraft.

The attack risks further straining ties between Turkey and the United States, which works with the YPG as an effective force in the fight against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.

Turkey also accuses Russian Federation of directly supporting the YPG. The Turkish jets attacked PKK positions in northern Iraq’s Haftanin region, hitting the group of rebels which it said included a number of senior PKK leaders, the military said.

In an interview published by pro-PKK media on Wednesday, PKK commander Cemil Bayik said he did not know who carried out the Ankara attack but said it could have been “revenge for the massacres” in Kurdish areas.

Ankara appears increasingly uneasy over the group’s recent gains across its border and has continued to shell the militia despite global calls for it to stop.

Ankara was already on alert after 103 people were killed on October 10 when two suicide bomber linked to IS blew themselves up in a crowd of peace activists, the bloodiest attack in the country’s modern history.

People pray at a funeral for eight victims of the February 17 vehicle bombing at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey.

Turkey has been waging an all-out offensive against the PKK, imposing military operations backed by curfews to flush out the rebels from several southeastern urban centres including Cizre.