Turkish police car attacked with rocket fire in southeast

DİYARBAKIR - Reuters

DHA Photo

Suspected militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fired a rocket at an armored police vehicle and opened fire on a police station in the southeastern Turkish town of Cizre on Jan. 7, injuring two officers in a surge of violence threatening a fragile peace process.

Security sources said the two officers were injured when their vehicle was hit by a rocket as they drove across a bridge while on patrol in the town. There was a brief gun battle as officers returned fire in the attack on the police station.

Four people, two of them teenagers, have been killed over the past few weeks in clashes in Cizre.
Some of the violence has been Kurdish infighting between Islamist Kurds and youth groups linked to PKK militants, but locals have also clashed with the Turkish police.

The violence highlights the fragility of a two-year-old peace process between Turkey and the PKK, a militant group that has waged a three-decade insurgency for greater Kurdish autonomy in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.

Thirty-five people died in early October after unrest in several southeastern cities over what they perceived as the government’s failure to help Syrian Kurds fighting Islamist jihadists in the besieged Syrian border town of Kobane.