Turkey said it unleashed air strikes on militant targets in northern Iraq and detained suspects in Istanbul overnight, hours after Kurdish militants said they orchestrated the first bomb attack in the capital Ankara in years.
On Sunday morning, two attackers detonated a bomb near government buildings in Ankara, leaving them both dead and wounding two police officers. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group claimed responsibility
The defence ministry said many militants were “neutralised”, a term mostly used to mean killed, in air strikes that destroyed 20 targets – caves, shelters and depots used by the PKK in Iraq’s Metina, Hakurk, Qandil and Gara regions.
Turkey has stepped up military action against the PKK in northern Iraq over the last few years in operations it says are conducted under self-defence rights arising from Article 51 of the United Nations charter.
The PKK is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and European Union. It launched an insurgency in southeast Turkey in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
On Sunday, CCTV footage obtained by Reuters showed a vehicle pulling up outside the interior ministry’s main gate in Ankara and one of its occupants quickly walking toward the building before being engulfed in an explosion.
The bomb killed one attacker and security forces killed the other, the interior minister said. The blast rattled a district that is home to ministries and the parliament, in an attack coinciding with the reopening of the assembly.
One attacker was identified as a PKK member and work was continuing on identifying the other one, an interior ministry statement said, adding that explosives, grenades, a rocket launcher and various guns were seized at the scene.
