After Ankara bombing, Türkiye strikes back in Iraq and at home

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey said it launched airstrikes on militant targets in northern Iraq and detained suspects in Istanbul overnight, hours after Kurdish militants said they had orchestrated the first bomb attack in the capital Ankara in years. .

On Sunday morning, two attackers detonated a bomb near government buildings in Ankara, killing them both and wounding two police officers. The banned militant group Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) claimed responsibility.

The Defense Ministry said many militants were “neutralized” – a term mainly used to refer to dead – in airstrikes that destroyed 20 targets – caves, shelters and warehouses used by the PKK in the Iraqi regions of Metina, Hakurk, Qandil and Gara.

Turkey has stepped up military action against the PKK in northern Iraq in recent years in operations it says are carried out under self-defense rights derived from Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Iraqi President Abdul-Latif Rashid said in comments issued on Monday that Iraq rejected repeated Turkish airstrikes or the presence of Turkish bases in its Kurdistan region and hoped to reach an agreement with Ankara to resolve the issue.

The PKK is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. It launched an insurgency in southeastern Turkey in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have died in the conflict.

On Sunday, CCTV footage seen by Reuters showed a vehicle stopping outside the main gate of the Interior Ministry in Ankara and one of its occupants walking quickly towards the building before being engulfed in an explosion.

The bomb killed one attacker and security forces killed the other, the interior minister said. The explosion rocked a district housing ministries and parliament, in an attack that coincided with the reopening of the assembly.

One attacker was identified as a member of the PKK and work continues to identify the other, a statement from the Interior Ministry said, adding that explosives, grenades, a rocket launcher and several weapons were seized at the scene.

He said the attackers hijacked the vehicle and killed its driver in Kayseri, a city 260 kilometers (161 miles) southeast of Ankara.

Police raids

Since then, counterterrorism police have detained 20 people in raids targeting PKK-linked suspects in Istanbul and elsewhere, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said Monday.

Among those detained were a Kurdish provincial spokesperson and district heads of a large pro-Kurdish political party, suspected of collecting aid and providing shelter to PKK members, Yerlikaya said on the X messaging platform.

The PKK-friendly ANF News website quoted the militant group as saying in a statement on Sunday that a team from its Immortal Battalion unit had carried out the attack.

The Ataturk Boulevard bomb was the first in Ankara since 2016when there were a series of attacks on Turkish cities claimed by Kurdish militants, Islamic State and other groups.

In recent years, the Turkish armed forces have carried out several large scale military operations in northern Iraq and northern Syria against Kurdish militants.

President Tayyip Erdogan told parliament on Sunday that Turkey would maintain its strategy of creating a 30-kilometer-deep “security strip” beyond its southern borders with Syria and Iraq, and that “new steps” in this regard were a matter of time. . .

Asked whether Erdogan’s comments indicated plans for a new large-scale cross-border operation in Syria, Defense Minister Yasar Guler told reporters at a reception in parliament that the president said “nothing new.”

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