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.
