Turkey Retaliates Against PKK Attack In Ankara

Jennifer George
Jennifer George October 24, 2024

turkey-attacks-pkk

Image Credits: AFP

On Wednesday, several videos surfaced on X depicting two shooters firing guns near the entrance of the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), located 40km from Tukey’s capital city of Ankara.

The Turkish government announced that its military launched attacks on select locations in Iraq and Syria on Wednesday night. “A total of 32 targets belonging to the terrorists were successfully destroyed,” the Turkish defense ministry confirmed in a statement. This posed as a retaliatory attack from Turkey in response to the Kurdish militant group PKK. The attack in Ankara led to the deaths of five people and left 22 people injured at the TAI headquarters.

Several Turkish heads of state condemned the Ankara attacks. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the TAI attacks a “vile terror attack” in a post on X. Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya confirmed the two attackers, a male and female duo, had been “neutralized,” linking the attacks to the Turkish terrorist organization, the PKK.

The US and the UK have declared the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) a terrorist group operating in Turkey. The PKK has engaged in a sporadic conflict with the Turkish state since the 1980s, advocating for greater rights for the country’s substantial Kurdish minority.

To prevent the spread of misinformation and speculation, Turkish authorities have implemented a media blackout regarding the details of the attack. Users across the country have reported difficulties accessing social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. Ebubekir Sahin, president of Turkey’s Radio and TV Supreme Council, ordered Turkish users to remove all footage of the attacks from their social media accounts, declaring the spread of such information on the global stage as “serving the purpose of terrorism.”

News