Turkey Identifies Ankara Bomber as a Kurdish Rebel
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Version 0 of 1. ISTANBUL — A woman affiliated with Kurdish militias was responsible for carrying out a suicide car bombing in Ankara over the weekend, the Turkish Interior Ministry said Tuesday. The attacker, who struck Kizilay Square in central Ankara, the capital, on Sunday killing at least 37 people, has been identified as Seher Cagla Demir, a Turkish citizen born in 1992. The ministry said that Ms. Demir joined the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., in 2013 and later crossed into Syria to receive training from Syrian Kurdish militants from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G. Turkey considers both groups to be terrorist organizations. The ministry’s claim could not be independently verified. The P.K.K. has a history of attacking Turkish security forces but not civilians. No one has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack in Ankara, which came three weeks after another car bombing in the capital that killed 30 people. A splinter group of the P.K.K. claimed that attack. The ministry’s announcement is likely to heighten tensions between Turkey and the United States, which has been coordinating with Y.P.G. forces on the ground in Syria in the fight against the Islamic State. The United States’ stance toward the Y.P.G., including an insistence on differentiating between the group and the P.K.K., has angered Turkey, a NATO ally, which views the groups as one and the same. Turkish security forces have been at war with Kurdish militants in southeastern Turkey since the breakdown of a fragile peace process last year. The Turkish Army has also been shelling Y.P.G. positions in northern Syria. Turkish officials fear that the Syrian Kurds’ expansion across Turkey’s 560-mile border with Syria will fuel separatist ambitions among Kurds in Turkey. |