Turkey rounds up more Daesh suspects, strikes Kurds in Syria

ANKARA — Turkey pressed on with its “war on terror” on Tuesday, just five days before a pivotal election, detaining dozens of Daesh suspects in massive police raids and hitting Kurdish rebels across the border in Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been playing the security card in the run-up to Sunday’s vote with tensions running high over the renewed Kurdish conflict and a massive bomb attack blamed on Daesh militants.

Around 200 Turkish police swooped at dawn on suspected Daesh hideouts in the conservative central Anatolian city of Konya, detaining 30 people including one woman, the Dogan news agency said.

Backed up by helicopters, counter-terrorism police also raided addresses in three districts of Istanbul, detaining 21 suspects, including seven children, Dogan added.

Another 20 were arrested in a similar operation in the town of Kocaeli, east of Istanbul, it said.

Rebels from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were also targeted in raids in the eastern town of Elazig, with 13 arrests, Dogan said.

The cross-country raids followed a similar operation Monday in the main Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakir which left two policemen and seven Daesh suspects dead during a fierce gunbattle.

It was the first such shootout on Turkish soil since Ankara joined the US-led coalition against the extremist group earlier this year.

The two slain policemen were victims of a suicide bomber, Diyarbakir police said in a statement, after officials earlier blamed a booby trap bomb.

Several of the seven dead Daesh suspects had blown themselves up, a security source told AFP.

The Turkish army also said security forces had detained 17 foreign jihadists as they attempted to cross into Syria from the border region of Kilis on Monday.

Turkey has been on the hunt for Daesh extremists since the twin bombings on a peace rally in Ankara on October 10 that killed 102 people and wounded 500 more, the worst such attack in the country’s history.

Erdogan, an increasingly polarising figure in Turkey, on Monday vowed to press ahead with operations against all “terrorists” including Daesh and the outlawed PKK.

Media reports at the weekend said security forces feared a Daesh cell was plotting large-scale attacks to disrupt the election.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also confirmed Monday that the military had struck Kurdish fighters across the border in northern Syria.

In an interview with pro-government A Haber television, Davutoglu said Turkey had warned members of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) not to cross to the west of the Euphrates River and if they did, Turkey would attack.

“We struck twice,” he said, without giving any further details.

Ankara regards the PYD as the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, which resumed deadly attacks against Turkish forces in July after a bomb attack in a Kurdish majority town near the Syrian border that killed 34 activists.

Turkey responded by launching an air war against PKK bases in northern Iraq, shattering a delicate 2013 ceasefire and hopes of an end to a conflict that has raged for three decades.