October 22, 2015•Update: October 23, 2015
ANKARA
The suicide bomb attack that killed 102 people in Ankara was jointly planned by a range of groups, including Daesh, Kurdish militants and Syria’s intelligence agency, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday.
Speaking at a trades’ union conference in Ankara, Erdogan identified Daesh, the PKK and its Syrian affiliate the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Syrian intelligence as being behind the Oct. 10 attack that targeted leftist and pro-Kurdish peace protesters.
“This was a collective terrorist action,” he told an audience at the HAK-IS assembly in Ankara. “Daesh, the PKK, al-Mukhabarat and the PYD terrorist organization in northern Syria, were involved in it. All of them jointly planned this action.”
Syria has four intelligence agencies, two of which incorporate the name al-Mukhabarat -- the Military Intelligence Service and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. The latter, despite its name, is tasked with the most sensitive domestic and overseas operations and is closest to the Assad regime.
The Ankara attack was the deadliest in modern Turkish history. It came as the country prepared for a general election re-run on Nov. 1 amid the renewed Kurdish conflict and Turkey's more open involvement in the war in Syria.
