Deadly blast rocks Turkey's Kurdish heartland

A suspected car bomb attack in Diyarbakir has killed at least eight people and wounded more than a hundred others just hours after Turkish authorities detained Kurdish politicians.

MENA

2 min read

The New Arab

04 November, 2016

Turkey - Diyarbakir bombing

A large explosion hit Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast region on Friday.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that eight people had been killed in the attack, and more than a hundred injured. Yidirim said the dead were made up of two police officers, five civilians, and one member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The attack occurred in the Baglar district of Diyarbakir, close to a building used by riot police. The Diyarbakir governor’s office said the attack is believed to have been caused by a car bomb, with accusation pointed at the PKK.

Gunshots were also heard after the blast with some claiming, on social media, that Turkish authorities had fired shots to disperse crowds that had gathered around the scene of the attack.

Media reports in the aftermath of the Diyarbakir attack said that the explosion could be heard from several parts of the city and caused damage to nearby buildings. Television footage showed people walking amid broken glass and other debris from a building where windows were blown out.

Turkish authorities have imposed a temporary blackout on coverage of the explosion.

The blast comes just hours after Turkish authorities detained 11 Kurdish politicians including joint-head of the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas.

The PKK has been locked in a three-decade-long insurgency against the Turkish state. The collapse of a fragile ceasefire in 2015 has seen a consequent escalation of violence that, according to Anadolu, has left at least 700 state security personnel and thousands of Kurdish fighters killed. The PKK is officially deemed a terrorist organisation by the Turkish state, the US, UK, and European Union, but not by the UN.

Turkey has been plagued by a series of deadly bomb attacks in the past 18 months, carried out by Kurdish militants or Islamic State group extremists. Ankara is also worried that growing Kurdish autonomy in Syria over the course of its civil war could embolden Turkey’s own Kurdish community to seek similar freedoms and independence.

Agencies contributed to this report