ISTANBUL, Turkey — A bomb hit an armored police van in southeastern Turkey on Friday,
injuring nine people and reviving fears of new unrest in the mainly
Kurdish region.
اضافة اعلان
Eight police
officers and another person were hurt in the attack near the city of
Diyarbakir, the local governor’s office said.
The nine were
rushed to hospital as a “precaution”, a statement said, adding that their
injuries were not life-threatening.
Television images
showed a white bus standing on a debris-strewn road with its luggage
compartment heavily damaged.
The mangled
remains of a smaller vehicle stood nearby.
There were no
immediate claims of responsibility.
The blast on a
road between Diyarbakir and the city of Mardin was the first in the region
reported by officials in more than five years.
It came with
Turkey stepping up air strikes against Kurdish forces in northern Syria, and
continuing its limited ground campaign in Iraq.
Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to launch a new ground offensive in northern
Syria after a November bombing killed six people in Istanbul.
Last Sunday, he
told Russian President Vladimir Putin, a key player in the Syrian conflict, to
“cleanse” Kurdish forces from the border region.
The outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), designated as a terrorist organization by
Turkey and its Western allies, has claimed some of the past bombings in the
region.
The PKK has been
waging a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state that has killed tens
of thousands of civilians and security personnel.
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