Eleven Turkish police officers were killed and 78 people injured yesterday in a suicide truck bombing by suspected Kurdish rebels, three days into a two-pronged Turkish offensive in Syria.
The early morning blast almost completely destroyed the police headquarters in the southeastern town of Cizre, just north of the Syrian border.
“At 6:45am, a suicide attack with a vehicle laden with explosives was carried out by the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] terror group on the building of anti-riot police,” the provincial governor’s office said in a statement.
Photo: AP
Turkish Minister of Health Recep Akdag said four people were in critical condition.
The explosion occurred hours after the Turkish military shelled positions held by Kurdish militia inside Syria.
Turkey says its three-day-old operation in Syria — its biggest to date in its war-torn neighbor — is targeting both the Islamic State group and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia leading the fight against the Islamic State in the area.
Ankara has labeled the YPG, which has links to Turkey’s outlawed PKK, as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria near the Turkish border.
The blast in Cizre tore the facade off the four-story police headquarters, sending up clouds of thick black smoke. Adjacent buildings were also badly damaged.
The state-run Anadolu news agency said the bomb went off 50m away from the building at a control post.
Cizre, a majority Kurdish town, has borne the brunt of renewed violence between the outlawed PKK and government forces since the collapse of a ceasefire last year.
Turkish security forces have been hit by near daily attacks by the PKK since the two-and-a-half year truce collapsed, leaving hundreds of police officers and soldiers dead. The latest bombing came at a critical moment, with hundreds of Turkish forces and dozens of tanks deployed inside Syria.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yidirim denounced as a “bare-faced lie” suggestions in Western media that the Syria operation was singling out Kurds.
“They either know nothing about the world, or else their job is to report a bare-faced lie,” Yildirim said.
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