Turkey points to Kurdish militants for deadly Istanbul bombing
Turkish security forces have arrested a Syrian woman they say confessed to carrying out the attack under instructions from Kobani, but both the Kurdistan Workers Party and Syrian Kurdish forces deny any involvement.
Ankara pointed the finger at the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its Syrian offshoot as the hand behind Sunday’s bomb attack in a bustling pedestrian street in central Istanbul that killed at least six people and wounded 80.
“Our assessment is that the order for the deadly terror attack came from Ayn al-Arab [Kobani, a Kurdish-majority city in northern Syria], where the PKK/YPG has its Syrian headquarters,” Suleyman Soylu, Turkey’s iron-fisted interior minister, said early Monday. YPG refers to the People’s Protection Units, the military wing of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). Turkey considers both the YPG and PYD terrorist groups and repeatedly urges its allies to sever ties with both.
Within hours of Soylu’s initial statement, the Istanbul police released footage of a house raid carried out in the early hours of Monday and announced that they had arrested a Syrian woman, Ahlam Albashir, who admitted to planting the bomb.
“The person has admitted during the interrogation that she was trained as a special intelligence officer by the PKK/PYD/YPG terrorist organization. She entered [Turkey] illegally through Afrin for the attack,” read the statement, accompanied by a photo of a young woman in a purple T-shirt and with a swollen face. “She said that she planted the bomb at 16:20 in line with the instructions she received from the PKK/PYD/YPG terrorist organization's headquarters in Kobani and fled.”
