Suicide Attack by Kurdish Militants in Turkey Kills 2 Soldiers

ISTANBUL — Kurdish militias carried out a suicide attack on a Turkish military police station in eastern Turkey on Sunday, killing two soldiers and wounding 31 others, the local authorities said.

In an overnight assault, members of the separatist Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., rammed a tractor loaded with two tons of explosives into the station located in the Dogubeyazit district of Agri province, close to Turkey’s border with Iran, the local governor’s office said in a statement.

The attack comes at a time of heightened tensions between the armed group and the Turkish state, following the collapse of a two-year ceasefire and Turkey’s resumption of air raids on P.K.K. targets in northern Iraq.

In 2013, both sides had reached a truce when Turkey vowed to grant its Kurdish minority greater rights and autonomy in exchange for a cease-fire after a three-decade insurgency that claimed more than 40,000 lives.

Ahmet Davutoglu, right, Turkey's prime minister, acknowledged applause at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara on Wednesday.Turkey Escalates Airstrikes on Kurdish Targets in Northern IraqJULY 29, 2015
graphic Turkey Agrees to Assist U.S. With Airstrikes Against ISISJUNE 12, 2014
Turkish officials in Ankara said the crackdown against the P.K.K., which also included hundreds of arrests across Turkey, was in response to increased violence carried out by the group over the past month.

Ankara launched raids against the group on July 24 after its members killed two police officers in retaliation for a suicide attack in the southeast town of Suruc last month that was carried out against Kurdish activists by a Turkish citizen with suspected ties to the Islamic State. The P.K.K. accused Turkish authorities of facilitating the attack.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Friday said Turkey would not accept a ceasefire as people are being “martyred,” adding that the operations would continue as long as the group continued to threaten the country’s national security.

But in an opinion column published in The Washington Post, Mr. Davutoglu said that Turkey was still committed to pushing forward with a peace process.

“All terrorist organizations that target Turkey must know that their acts will not go unpunished and that we will respond to their acts with full resolve, as we have every right to under international law,” Mr. Davutoglu wrote.

“This is not to say that the process of seeking a solution is over; on the contrary, I am determined to take it forward, as rapidly as I am able, to its logical conclusion once a new government is in place in Turkey,” he added.

Turkey is currently in the process of forming a new government, after the ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., lost its parliamentary majority in a June 7 election. If Mr. Davutoglu fails to form a coalition government later this month, Turkey could face an early election in November.

The escalating conflict between the P.K.K. and Turkey has also roiled the neighboring Kurdistan region of Iraq, where officials said that renewed Turkish air strikes on the P.K.K. over the weekend had hit residential areas and caused civilian deaths.

Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan’s semiautonomous regional government, said on Saturday that the P.K.K. should “keep the battlefield away from the Kurdish region, to ensure the civilians of Kurdistan don’t become victims of that fighting and conflict.”

He also repeated his call to the Turks to stop the bombing and push for a political solution. Some Iraqi outlets reported that Mr. Barzani had asked the P.K.K. to leave Iraqi Kurdistan entirely; his office denied that.

But questions continued to simmer about whether the airstrikes coupled with Turkish pressure would push Mr. Barzani – who has long cultivated economic ties and political cooperation with the Turkish government – to make Iraqi Kurdistan less hospitable to the P.K.K.

That could have a subsequent effect of disrupting the military efforts of the P.K.K.’s affiliate in Syria, the People’s Protection Units, known as the Y.P.G., which has been one of the most effective groups battling the Islamic State and has become the most reliable partner on the ground for the U.S.-led coalition conducting air strikes.

Along with its efforts to combat the P.K.K., Turkey has also stepped up its fight against the Islamic State. Last week, the Turkish military engaged in its first cross-border confrontation with militants, while carrying out airstrikes on its targets in Syria. Ankara also granted permission to the U.S. to use Turkish airbases as part of its bombardment campaign against the Islamic State.

When asked by the BBC if the P.K.K. could expect to stay forever in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Kurdish official was equivocal, saying that the aim was a political end to battle with Turkey that would obviate the need for the Iraqi Kurdistan bases.

The leftist P.K.K. has long been headquartered in Iraqi Kurdistan but has a wary relationship and ideological differences with the main Iraqi Kurdish parties. Nonetheless, most Kurds are united against the Islamic State, and Mr. Barzani’s regional government has supported the expanding role of the P.K.K.’s Syrian affiliate, the Y.P.G., in battling the group.

Mr. Barzani was said to have played a role in easing tension with Turkey as the Y.P.G. battled ISIS in the Syrian Kurdish border town Kobani last year – and in persuading Turkey to open limited supply lines to the Y.P.G. and to the Kurdish communities that it was defending. His government also sent Iraqi Kurdish Pesh Merga fighters through Turkey to Kobani to reinforce the Syrian Kurds. Mr. Barzani’s government also supplied arms that were airdropped to the Y.P.G. by aircraft of the U.S.-led coaltion agaisnt ISIS and trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies and bearing portraits of Mr. Barzani on their hoods drove from Iraqi Kurdistan through Turkey and into Syria during that battle.

But now he is under pressure, both from Turkey and from his own constituency. Iraqi Kurds are loath to be drawn into another battle when they are already involved in a war with ISIS.

It is unclear whether Mr. Barzani has the power to eject the P.K.K.; Iraqi officials said he could more realistically disrupt its supply lines and communications between its main bases in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Y.P.G. in Syria.

“That would be a disaster,” both for the battle against ISIS and for Mr. Barzani politically, said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of Iraq’s central parliament who has held security posts in the past and continues to follow security issues closely. He said it could have a serious negative impact on the fight against ISIS.

“I think it will be significant, especially in the north – north of Iraq and north of Syria,” he said.

Safeen Dazai, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government, said in an interview that he did not know of any impact on the anti-ISIS effort in Syria so far as a result of the Turkish strikes in Iraq, denying any knowledge of the P.K.K. sending supplies or fighters from Iraq into Syria. In practice, Y.P.G. fighters easily cross in and out of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Y.P.G. has been taking back territory from ISIS in areas near the Turkish and Iraqi borders – important to Iraq’s battle with ISIS because it removes some of their strategic depth around nearby Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, which ISIS has designated its capital.

Officials of Iraq’s central government are eager to embrace any available allies against the Islamic State – including the P.K.K. — and have called the Turkish strikes a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.