A Kurdish militant group on Friday claimed responsibility for an attack on a major state-run defense company in Turkey’s capital, an action that analysts say could complicate prospects for renewed peace talks between the Turkish government and the country’s Kurdish minority.
Two assailants set off explosives and opened fire Wednesday at the aerospace and defense company TUSAS in Ankara, killing five people and wounding 22, Turkey’s interior ministry said.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, said in a statement Friday that the attack on the defense firm was for its role in producing weapons used in attacks against Kurdish civilians.
The PKK has been designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The Kurdish militant group has engaged in a four-decade armed conflict with the Turkish government for greater Kurdish rights in Turkey.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, designed and assembled by TUSAS, have been instrumental in Turkey’s fight against Kurdish militants.
Wednesday’s attack came a day after Devlet Bahceli, leader of Turkey’s far-right nationalist party and a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggested the possibility of granting parole to PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, if the Kurdish group laid down its arms.
A peace process between the two sides that started in 2013 collapsed in 2015.
Yerevan Saeed, director of the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace at American University in Washington, said the attack in Ankara represented a significant strategic blunder for the PKK.
“This incident highlights a concerning lack of strategic vision at this important time,” he told VOA. “While the Turkish government’s initiative to restart peace talks could be seen as a tactical maneuver, the Kurdish armed group must avoid providing the state with any justification to abandon the dialogue, which could in turn diminish international sympathy for the Kurdish cause.”
Shortly after the Ankara attack, Turkey’s military struck Kurdish militant targets in Iraq and Syria that Turkish officials said belonged to offshoots of the PKK. The Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency said Friday that 120 targets had been struck in Iraq and Syria since Wednesday.
Erdogan, on a flight back from the BRICS summit in Russia, told reporters Friday that the perpetrators of the Ankara attack had infiltrated from Syria, and he vowed to continue efforts to combat terrorism.
In Kurdish-controlled Syria, some of the strikes hit power grids and water pump stations, causing outages of water and electricity in several cities in northeast Syria. Reporters for VOA Kurdish in the region visited several sites that had been damaged in the strikes.
Sinan Ciddi, a Turkey expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, said Turkish citizens would demand “a strong military response” from the government for the Ankara bombing.
He told VOA that “the terror attack also reduces the chances for renewed negotiations between Erdogan and the PKK for a peace process.”
‘No military solution’
Amy Austin Holmes, a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, said in every peace process there are spoilers who want to sabotage it.
“There is no military solution to what is an inherently political and social issue of equal citizenship. President Erdogan and the Kurdish movement both recognize this,” she told VOA. “In order for the dialogue process not to be derailed by the PKK’s attack in Ankara, and Turkey’s bombardment of northern Syria and Iraq, cooler heads need to prevail.”
Henri Barkey, professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said the PKK-claimed attack made no sense.
“The only thing I can think of is that operations such as this one take months to prepare, so these guys had orders and it was never called off because they may have been under a blanket-of-communication order,” he said.
“This is bad for the PKK given that a process is supposed to start and that they could not prevent it from happening,” he added. “The other half of the explanation is that there may be divisions in the organization and the group in charge of this chose not to stop it.”
But other analysts, like Brussels-based Kurdish affairs researcher Hosheng Ose, believe that regardless of the attack in Ankara and the strikes on Iraq and Syria, there seems to be a decision within the Turkish political establishment to reach a settlement with the country’s Kurds.
“There are elements within both the Turkish state and the PKK that oppose any prospects for peace, but I don’t believe that will have any effect on what the Turkish government wants to achieve,” he told VOA.
“Turkey is really concerned with the recent developments across the Middle East, and it wants to ensure that no Kurdish group would play a role that could threaten Turkey’s long-term objectives,” said Ose.
This story originated in VOA’s Kurdish Service.
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