Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged to curb what he calls “one of the biggest and bloodiest terrorist waves” that his country has ever seen.
Speaking in Istanbul two days after five people were killed in a bombing attack in the Turkish city, Erdogan vowed to overcome Kurdish fighters and Daesh Takfiri terrorists who he said posed an unprecedented threat to the country’s security.
“We will hit these terrorist organizations as hard as possible,” he said Monday.
The Turkish head of state added that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and other groups were in cahoots with the Daesh Takfiri group in their terrorist operations.
“Faced with the terrorists’ new strategies we will develop new modes of combat and quickly overcome them,” Erdogan said, promising to refrain from sacrificing democratic values.
He also accused Europe of “two-faced behavior” for allowing PKK supporters to camp outside a summit between the European Union and Turkey in the Belgian capital city of Brussels last week.
he PKK has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey, which has an 18-25 percent Kurdish population.
However, the Ankara government considers the PKK a terrorist group and has waged a campaign of attacks against it, resulting in a three-decade conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.
The Saturday deadly bombing in Istanbul was the sixth of its kind to rip through various Turkish cities over the past eight months.