2 killed in bomb attack on police station in Turkey
Print Edition
Kurdish rebels yesterday detonated an explosives-laden agricultural vehicle at a military police station in eastern Turkey, killing two soldiers and wounding 24 others, authorities said, amid a sharp escalation of violence between government forces and the autonomy-seeking insurgents.
Militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, used 2 tons of explosives to attack the station on a highway near the town of Dogubayazit in Agri province, close to Turkey’s border with Iran, causing extensive damage to the building, the regional governor’s office said in a statement.
The wounded soldiers were hospitalized but there was no word on their conditions.
In a separate attack, a soldier was killed and four others were injured when their military vehicle hit a land mine believed to have been laid by the rebels in the southeastern Mardin province, the local governor’s office said yesterday.
Violence has flared in Turkey in the past 10 days, shattering a fragile peace process launched in 2012 with the Kurds. The government has conducted almost daily airstrikes at PKK bases in northern Iraq while the rebels have attacked Turkey’s security forces. The airstrikes began as the United States and Turkey announced the outlines of a deal to help push the Islamic State group back from a strip of territory it controls along the Syrian-Turkish border, replacing it with more-moderate rebels backed by Washington and Ankara.
At least 24 people have been killed in the renewed violence in Turkey, most of them soldiers.
Turkey’s allies have supported its fight against the PKK, which they consider a terror organization, but they have also urged Turkey to exercise restraint and to return to the peace process.
Turkey’s campaign against the PKK is complicating the US war on IS militants, which has relied heavily on Syrian Kurdish fighters affiliated with Turkey’s Kurdish rebels.
Government critics and Kurdish activists accuse the government of reigniting the conflict in a bid to win nationalist votes and erode support for the country’s pro-Kurdish party in possible new elections in the fall.
Turkey’s Anadolu Agency has claimed that about 260 rebels were killed in the air raids against PKK targets in northern Iraq. The PKK has not reported on its casualties. Kurdish activists said, however, that the Turkish airstrikes had destroyed at least six homes in the town of Zargel on Saturday, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 12.
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