Seven police officers died and at least 27 more people were wounded by a car bombing close to a bus terminal in southeastern Turkey — the latest such blast to rock the country.
The bomb went off as a police vehicle was going past in the Baglar district of Diyarbakir, the capital of its namesake province, about 170 kilometers (100 miles) from the Syrian border, according to Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency. The local prosecutor’s office said the bomb was in a parked car, apparently timed to go off as a special operation police vehicle passed.
The explosion damaged numerous cars, the bus terminal and other buildings in the area. The injured include 14 civilians and 13 police, and one of each is in critical condition, Turkey’s development minister Cevdet Yilmaz said, according to Anadolu.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack. Kurdish rebels and ISIS militants have claimed similar recent incidents, including:
March 19: Istanbul blast kills 4 foreigners
A suicide bomber detonated explosives on Saturday, March 19, in a busy tourist area of central Istanbul, killing at least four people and wounding 36 others.
Two of the four dead were American-Israeli dual citizens, an Israeli government source and a U.S. source said. A third Israeli also died, and Iran state media reported that an Iranian was also killed.
Interior Minister Efkan Ala identified that attacker as Mehmet Ozturk and claimed he had links to ISIS.
March 13: Kurdish rebels claim Ankara blast
On March 13, an even deadlier car bomb ripped through a busy square in Turkey’s capital, Ankara.
The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK — a militant offshoot of the Kurdish separatist group PKK, which seeks an independent state in Turkey — boasted that its members carried out this attack, which killed 37 people.
A ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker’s Party, fell apart last summer. Since then, Turkish forces have bombed the terror group’s positions in northern Iraq and imposed curfews in crackdowns on heavily Kurdish areas in southeastern Turkey.
Kurdish militants, meanwhile, haven’t relented, with some of them becoming even more adamant, and violent, in pursuit of their cause.
February 17: Explosion hits military vehicles in capital
A February 17 explosion apparently targeting military vehicles in Ankara left 28 dead and 61 wounded, according to Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus.
Three military vehicles and one private vehicle were stopped at a traffic light when the bomb went off, sending large flames shooting into the night sky.
Later that week, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons called that attack a “suicide revenge mission” for Turkish military operations in the southeastern Turkish district of Cizre and threatened more violence.
“This act was a revenge (for) the massacre of wounded civilians in basements in Cizre,” the group said then in a statement on its website. “… We will act against every attack on the Kurdish people.”
January 12: Strike near Istanbul tourist attractions
A suicide blast in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Square killed 10 people, all of them Germans, in what was viewed as a strike against both Turkish culture and the country’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry.
The explosion ripped through a typically busy area between between the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, both major tourist attractions in Istanbul.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed ISIS, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while lashing out elsewhere again and again.
“An ISIS connection has been identified,” Davutoglu said. “But ISIS is a pawn, an intermediary organization, a subcontractor.”