Turkey Attacks Kurdish Militant Bases in Northern Iraq After Suicide Bomb Attack in Ankara

Illustration of the TAI Anka Turkish drone. (Wikimedia Commons/Mustafa.KarabasTUSAS)

JAKARTA - The Turkish military launched air strikes targeting Kurdish militant bases in northern Iraq on Sunday, hours after the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the capital Ankara.

In a statement, Turkey's Defense Ministry said its warplanes succeeded in destroying 20 PKK-linked targets, including caves, bunkers, shelters, and warehouses in the Metina, Hakurk, Kandil, and Gara regions.

"Many terrorists were successfully neutralized using the maximum amount of domestic and national ammunition," said the statement, citing the right to self-defense from Article 51 of the UN Charter as justification for the attack, reported by CNN, October 2.

The PKK, classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, previously said it was behind Sunday's explosion outside Turkey's Interior Ministry building that left one person dead and two others injured, according to the pro-Firat News Agency -PKK.

The ministry said in a separate statement that two attackers killed a civilian and stole his vehicle before the explosion ahead of the opening of parliament in Ankara. Two police officers reportedly suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

One of the attackers blew himself up and the other was "neutralized," the ministry said.

Investigators found four different types of firearms, three hand grenades, a rocket launcher, and C-4 explosives at the scene.

Apart from that, the ministry also confirmed that at least one of the two attackers was a PKK member. The second attacker has not been identified, he said.

Kurds, who have no homeland or official state, are Turkey's largest minority, accounting for between 15% and 20% of the population, according to Minority Rights Group International.

Part of the region, Kurdistan – a non-governmental region and one of the world's largest stateless states – is recognized by Iran, where the province of Kordestan is located; and Iraq, home to the northern autonomous region known as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) or Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ankara views the PKK as training separatist fighters and launching attacks on Turkey from its bases in northern Iraq and Syria, where PKK-affiliated Kurdish groups control large swathes of territory.

Last November, Ankara blamed the PKK for a bomb attack on a pedestrian area in Istanbul that killed six people and injured dozens more.

In recent years, Turkey has continued to launch operations against the PKK at home as well as cross-border operations into Syria.

Separately, in a speech to lawmakers on Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Turkey would continue its fight against terrorism "until the last terrorist is eliminated at home and abroad."