Two soldiers killed in Turkey as PKK truce teeters

A car bomb attack killed two Turkish soldiers and injured four in the Kurdish-dominated southeast of the country, after separatist rebels warned they would no longer observe a truce after Ankara's air strikes on their positions in Iraq, officials said July 26.

Turkey has launched a two-pronged "anti-terror" cross-border offensive against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants after a wave of violence in the country, pounding their positions with air strikes and artillery.
 
But the expansion of the campaign to include not just ISIL targets in Syria but PKK rebels in neighbouring northern Iraq bitterly opposed to the jihadists has put in jeopardy a truce with the Kurdish militants that has largely held since 2013.
 
The PKK on July 25 said that the conditions were no longer in place to observe the ceasefire, following the heaviest Turkish air strikes on its positions in northern Iraq since August 2011.
 
The car bomb went off as the soldiers were travelling on a road in the Lice district of Diyarbak?r province late July 25, the statement from the local governor's office said.
 
"Two of our personnel were killed in the heinous attack, four were wounded," said the statement, adding that large-scale operations have been launched to find the perpetrators. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
         
The PKK has for decades waged a deadly insurgency in the southeast of Turkey for self-rule that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. A peace process that began in 2013 has so far failed to yield a final deal.
 
"The ceasefire appears to be over," said David Romano, Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State...