(Bloomberg) -- Turkish airstrikes hit 47 targets in northern Iraq and Syria in retaliation of a deadly attack in the capital that it’s blamed on Kurdish militants.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said both assailants in Wednesday’s attack on state defense firm Turkish Aerospace Industries in Ankara were members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Besides the attackers, five people were killed and 22 were wounded in the incident.
Turkish warplanes and drones struck targets in Iraq and Syria overnight in an air campaign over an unusually large area. Strikes will likely continue in the near future, officials familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Targets included dozens of Syrian positions held by the Kurdish YPG, which Turkey says is a PKK affiliate, around three towns near the border, the people said. In Iraq, Turkey struck PKK hideouts near Sulaymaniyah and the group’s main bases on Mount Qandil near the border with Iran, they added.
The Ankara attack followed a historic call by an influential Turkish politician for the PKK’s long-imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan to be freed on the condition that he disbands the group. Such a move could help to resolve Turkey’s decades-long conflict with Kurdish militants. PKK commander Cemil Bayik said on Wednesday his group must be included in negotiations over its future.
Ocalan has been in prison in Turkey since 1999. While many PKK members consider him to be most important leader of their movement, the group is currently run by commanders on Mount Qandil, giving them a strong say over the group’s future.
The PKK, designated a terror organization by the US and the EU, has been fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeast on and off for the last four decades, in a conflict that’s estimated to have cost more than 40,000 lives.
Around the time of Wednesday’s attack in Ankara, Ocalan was allowed to see his nephew, the first such meeting in years, Hurriyet newspaper reported. The nephew, lawmaker Omer Ocalan, said on X that the PKK leader said he “held the power” to move the conflict toward a political solution.
In an apparent show of support for reconciliation, Turkey’s most prominent Kurdish prisoner, Selahattin Demirtas, expressed sorrow over the casualties in the Ankara attack. Demirtas is a former co-leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, a pro-Kurdish political party that’s separate from the PKK.
Demirtas pledged to “back Ocalan if he takes the initiative to open the way for politics” in an attempt to resolve the conflict.
--With assistance from Firat Kozok and Beril Akman.
(Updates second paragraph with details of two suspects.)
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