Turkey Hit by Wave of Attacks as Syria Fallout Emboldens PKK

Turkey’s war with Kurdish militants has entered its bloodiest phase in more than a decade, with attacks on soldiers and police almost every day and a breakdown in ties with neighbors that had helped to contain the threat.

On Sept. 18, an army convoy in the largely Kurdish southeast was ambushed, leaving 10 dead. Two days earlier, eight police were killed when a mine blew up their minibus, and the day before four soldiers died in a similar blast. Police defused a bomb today near the airport in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, while the state-run Anatolia agency reported an attack on a Netherlands-based energy company in southeast Turkey that injured four earlier this week. The army has killed 500 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK since February, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says.