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 Long a reluctant member of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic
State, Turkey last week made a dramatic turnaround by granting the
alliance access to its air bases and bombarding targets in Syria
linked to the jihadist movement.
The NATO member also launched a second night of air strikes on
Kurdish insurgent camps in Iraq on Sunday, part of what a senior
government official described as a "full-fledged battle against all
terrorist organizations".
The renewed military campaign against the Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish
state partly from camps in northern Iraq, has raised suspicions that
Turkey's real agenda is checking Kurdish territorial ambitions
rather than fighting Islamic State.
Ankara is concerned that the success in northern Syria of the
Kurdish YPG militia, which has pushed back Islamic State with the
help of U.S.-led air strikes, will stoke separatist sentiment among
its own Kurds and embolden the PKK.
 Turkey's Kurds say that by reviving open conflict with the PKK,
President Tayyip Erdogan is also seeking to undermine support for
the pro-Kurdish opposition ahead of a possible early election and
stoke up nationalist sentiment.
In a statement only likely to deepen Kurdish suspicions, the YPG
said that the Turkish army had shelled its positions in a village on
the outskirts of the Islamic State-held border town of Jarablus and
urged Ankara to halt attacks on its forces.
Several tank rounds from across the border hit its positions and the
Turkish army was targeting them instead of the "terrorists", the YPG
statement said.
A senior Turkish official confirmed that the Turkish army had shot
back after it came under fire from across the border late on Sunday,
but said it was unclear which group was involved and stressed that
the YPG was not a target.
"The ongoing military operation seeks to neutralize imminent threats
to Turkey's national security and continues to target Islamic State
in Syria and the PKK in Iraq," the official said, adding that Ankara
was investigating.
"The PYD (the political wing of the YPG), along with others, remains
outside the scope of the current military effort."
The YPG made further gains against Islamic State in northern Syria
on Monday, capturing a town near the Euphrates River after a
month-long offensive aimed at cutting their supply lines, the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, and YPG
spokesman Redur Xelil said.
HUNDREDS DETAINED
The PYD has emerged as the only notable partner so far on the ground
for the U.S.-led alliance as it fights Islamic State in northern
Syria.
But the Kurdish group has links to the PKK, which is considered a
terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United
States. The two share not only ideology but fighters, with the PKK
drawing Syrian Kurdish fighters to its camps in northern Iraq and
Turkish Kurds among the PYD ranks.
That has made for an uneasy compromise between Washington and
Ankara.
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Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was quoted on Monday as
saying the PYD could "have a place in the new Syria" if it did not
disturb Turkey, cut all relations with the administration of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad and cooperated with opposition forces.
Washington has reiterated that it labels the PKK as a terrorist
organization and stressed that it respects Turkey's right to take
action against the militant group.
Erdogan said last Friday that Turkey's operations against Islamist,
Kurdish and ultra-leftist militants would continue and warned that
all "terrorist" groups must lay down their weapons or face the
consequences.
The moves against the PKK come despite negotiations with the
militant group launched by Ankara in 2012 to end an insurgency that
has killed 40,000 people since 1984. The PKK has said the actions
have rendered the peace process meaningless.
Turkish security forces have rounded up 900 suspected members of
Islamic State, Kurdish militant sympathizers and leftist militants
in recent days, the government official said. Local media reports
said the vast majority were Kurdish and leftists, rather than
members of Islamic State.
The arrests have at times been violent. A police officer was killed
in Istanbul's volatile Gazi district on Sunday, the third day of
violence there following the death of a leftist activist during
police raids.
Some 500 police swept through the Haci Bayram district of Ankara on
Monday and detained 15 Islamic State suspects, 11 of them foreign,
the pro-government Yeni Safak daily said.
Operations also took place in the southeastern city of Adiyaman,
where 19 people with alleged links to the PKK were detained, it
reported.
"The operations continue in a number of locations across Turkey. As
of this morning, 900 people are under detention with suspected links
to Islamic State, the PKK and (ultra-leftist) DHKP-C," the
government official said.
"We are in a full-fledged battle against all terrorist
organizations."
(Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara and Ayla Jean
Yackley in Istanbul; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Sonya
Hepinstall)
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