Turkey blames Kurdish militants for Ankara car bombing

Hundreds of Syrian rebels prepared to head to frontlines in northern Aleppo province yesterday, after crossing from Turkey to reinforce fighters battling Kurdish militia.

Turkey’s foreign minister accused the United States on Friday of making conflicting statements about the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, and said the use of such groups in the fight against the Islamic State terror group was a sign of weakness. “We are not responsible for who will die in the attacks targeting those areas”, the group said and vowed more attacks on Turkish soil.

The YPG denied its members carried out the attack in a statement issued on Thursday.

The claim of responsibility by TAK is unlikely to make a difference to Turkey’s demand that Washington stop its support of the Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Firefighters work at a scene of fire from an explosion in Ankara, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016.

In October, suicide bombings blamed on IS targeted a peace rally outside the main train station in Ankara, killing 102 people in Turkey’s deadliest attack in years.

Merkel has been working closely with Turkey lately in an effort to reduce the flow of migrants to Europe.

The bombing prompted Mr Davutoglu to scrap a planned trip to Brussels on Thursday to discuss Europe’s migrant crisis. Turkish security sources said artillery shells began pounding Azaz again Thursday evening. Turkey regards the YPG as a mortal enemy, as an affiliate of the Turkish-based guerrilla organization the PKK. The U.S. already lists the PKK as a terror group. Daesh is a derogatory name for the Islamic State. It said they had arrived with weapons, though it could not provide details. There were no injuries because the association was closed at the time. The number of people killed has risen to 28.

Bystrom said Thursday “we have been in touch” with Sweden’s security police about the blast in Fittja, a suburb with a large immigrant population. Turkey blamed Kurdish militan…

The Munich plan was supposed to pave the way for the resumption next week of peace talks that collapsed earlier this month.

A Kurdish group claimed responsibility for the Ankara Bombing contradicting government claims that leftist Kurdish guerilla group PKK was behind it.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. The toll included at least 15 people who were killed when strikes hit a bakery in the city of Al-Shadadi near the border with Iraq on Tuesday, the Britain-based Observatory said.

“We have no link to these bombings and with what is happening inside Turkey”, he says.

Davutoglu, accompanied by other ministers, placed 28 carnations at the site of the attack Friday in honor of the dead.

Rodi Osman also said that the Russian aerospace forces support the Kurdish militia in their offensive in Syria’s northern Aleppo province towards the Turkish border. And some analysts, too, questioned the plausibility of the Syrian Kurds carrying out the attack, because doing so would jeopardize their US support.

Chances are that the war between Turkey and the PKK/YPG will be stepped up in the coming hours and days.

Davutoglu said that nine people have been detained in connection with the attack.

Cemil Bayik, one of the top leaders of the PKK who lives in northern Iraq, said he didn’t know who had carried out the bombing, but speculated that it may have been “an act of retaliation for the massacres in Kurdistan” – a reference to a brutal military campaign being waged by Turkey’s military against Kurds in southeastern Turkey.