Turkey rejected US condolences over the six deaths in an Istanbul bombing that Ankara attributed to a banned Kurdish militant group.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently charges Washington with arming Kurdish forces in northern Syria whom Ankara labels “terrorists.” The condolence message from the US embassy is not accepted by us. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu stated in television remarks that they reject it.
#UPDATE Turkey has rejected US condolences over the death of six people in a bomb attack in Istanbul that Ankara blamed on an outlawed Kurdish militant group. pic.twitter.com/Aqd7JVcG1J
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 14, 2022
Earlier, Soylu said that the attack on Sunday’s busy and historic Istiklal Avenue was carried out by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara claims is a branch of the PKK. Soylu claimed that the bomber went through Afrin after receiving the order in Kobani, both of which are northern Syrian cities where Turkish soldiers have been engaged in operations against the YPG. Three assaults by Turkey against the YPG in northern Syria, including one in 2019, resulted in the seizure of hundreds of kilometers of terrain. President Tayyip Erdogan stated earlier this year that another operation was approaching.
In the Syrian conflict, the United States has backed the YPG, infuriating Turkey, another NATO member. Numerous governments, including the United States, the European Union, Egypt, Ukraine, and Greece, expressed their condemnation of the act and sympathy for the victims. Turkish authorities connected the explosion to support for the YPG provided by Washington and others. Soylu compared the US condolences to “the murderer arriving as one of the first at the scene of the crime,” while Fahrettin Altun, the communications director for the White House, claimed that such attacks “are direct and indirect results of the support some countries give to terrorist organizations.”
Since 1984, the PKK has led an uprising against the Turkish government in which conflicts have claimed the lives of over 40,000 people. The United States, the European Union, and Turkey all view it as a terrorist organization.
In December 2016, two bombs outside an Istanbul soccer stadium claimed the lives of 38 people and injured 155 others. On Monday, Istanbul police announced that it had apprehended 46 persons in connection with an attack in the city’s center, including Ahlam Albashir, a Syrian woman who is thought to have set the device. The woman admitted during her initial interrogation that she had received training from Kurdish fighters in Syria and had traveled through the Afrin region of northwest Syria to enter Turkey.
