Eleven Turkish police officers were killed and 78 people injured today in a suicide truck bombing by suspected Kurdish rebels, three days into a two-pronged Turkish offensive against jihadists and Kurdish militia in neighbouring Syria.
The early morning blast almost completely destroyed the police headquarters in the southeastern town of Cizre, just north of the Syrian border.
“At 6:45 am (0915 IST), a suicide attack with a vehicle laden with explosives was carried out by the PKK terror group on the building of anti-riot police,” the provincial governor’s office said in a statement.
Eleven police officers were killed and 78 people injured, three of them civilians, the statement added. Health Minister Recep Akdag said four people were in critical condition. The explosion went off 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 neighbour — is aimed both at Islamic State (ISIS) jehadis and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia leading the fight against ISIS in the area. Ankara has labelled the YPG, which has links to Turkey’s outlawed PKK, as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria on the Turkish border.
The blast in Cizre tore the facade off the four-storey police headquarters, sending up clouds of thick black smoke. Adjacent buildings were also badly damaged.