Turkey Strengthens ISIL, Undermines Safety of German Soldiers – Politician

In further violence, Kurdish rebels attacked an infantry brigade command post in nearby Sirnak province, seriously wounding a soldier who later died in a hospital. Turkish officials blamed the Suruc bombing on a Kurdish follower of Islamic State, and days later unveiled their deal with the U.S.to open Turkey’s air bases for coalition raids on the extremist group.

Clashes between PKK terrorists and the security forces were reported after the bomb attack. Meanwhile, east of capital Tripoli, Islamic State fighters battled a rival Salafist Muslim group and residents.

Violence has dramatically escalated in Turkey over the past weeks.

Within a month, Turkey had reopened a front with the Kurdish separatist movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), with whom a truce had mostly held for more than two years.

“The EU condemns all acts of terrorism and expresses its solidarity with the Government and the people of Turkey“, Kocijancic said.

If all goes to plan, Turkey will call new elections this week, opening the way for the ruling party to make another claim on majority power.

In Diyarbakir, in southern Turkey, police seized improvised explosives and Molotov cocktails in an operation on Saturday evening against the suspected members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the youth wing of the PKK that is active in Turkey’s cities.

The United States and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey – are supporting the militants operating inside the country. Around half of Syria’s 900 km (560 mile) border with Turkey is controlled by Kurds, which is not a situation acceptable to Ankara.

Now, Erdogan and his ruling AKP party are betting the president’s political future on annihilating the PKK – the biggest perceived threat to Turkish sovereignty – in northern Iraq.

The Kurdish militia also has a stronghold in Syria’s north-west.

The events that unfolded since the beginning of the Turkish military campaign emphasize this assumption: out of 1,300 detainees, barely 137 were individuals with links to the IS, and most of the sorties of the Turkish Air Force have been directed against the PKK. In response, the PKK announced on its website that a truce with Ankara “has lost any sense”. Erdogan’s predecessors a century ago exterminated most of the Armenians and he probably regrets that they didn’t finish the Kurds too. The “safe zone” idea is a work in progress and we can not say what shape it might assume or even whether it will materialise.

The recent developments appeared to rattle a delicate ceasefire that brought relative calm to Turkey over the last two years after Ankara launched the “solution process” in 2013 to end a conflict spanning three decades that has resulted in the deaths of 40,000 people.