Turkish army blames Saturday blast on PKK

The Turkish military says the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group was behind a car bomb attack that left two of its soldiers dead in the country’s southeast last night.

The blast took place in the Lice district of Diyarbakir Province when the soldiers were travelling on a road on Saturday.

The army on Sunday blamed the deadly attack on the “Separatist Terror Organization,” a phrase used by the Turkish establishment to refer to the PKK.

The military also said that the soldiers who were killed had gone to the site to check out on a number of cars that had been set on fire when the blast occurred.

The attack came a day after Ankara started an offensive against what it purports to be ISIL positions in Syria and PKK targets in northern Iraq following the killing of 32 people in a massive “terrorist” explosion in the town of Suruç, near the southern border with Syria, on July 20. The attack was attributed to the ISIL.

Following the July 20 blast, violence in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast has also seen an upsurge, with a number of policemen and soldiers having been killed in attacks attributed by Turkish media to the PKK.

The PKK has been engaged in a militancy in southeastern Turkey for decades in a bid to gain self-rule.

A shaky ceasefire that had stood since 2013 was declared as null by the PKK following the Turkish airstrikes against the group.

One PKK militant in northern Iraq, identified as Onder Aslan, has reportedly been killed in the airstrikes.