(Istanbul) “The hour of reckoning has come,” the Turkish Ministry of Defense announced on Twitter on Sunday, showing the photo of a plane taking off for a night operation without specifying the location.
“The hour of reckoning has come! The bastards will be held accountable for their treacherous attacks,” the ministry wrote on its official account.
“Nests of terror are razed by precision strikes,” he added in another message on Twitter, posted with a video showing the definition of a target followed by an explosion, still without specifying where the attack takes place.
The ministry does not give any details on the operation which seemed to be underway in the night from Saturday to Sunday, but the Kurdish forces announced “aerial bombardments of the Turkish army” against the locality of Kobané, in the northeast of Syria and against two other villages.
An attack on November 13 in the busy shopping street of Istiklal, in the heart of Istanbul, killed six people and injured more than 80.
The authorities immediately designated the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Kurdish militia active in Syria, accused by Turkey of being affiliated with the PKK.
The two movements immediately denied any involvement.
Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu had specifically accused Kurdish YPG forces, which control most of northeastern Syria, of being responsible for the attack, saying “the order of the attack was been given from Kobane.
The US State Department said on Friday it feared “possible military action by Turkey”, advising its nationals not to travel to northern Syria and Iraq.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regularly expressed since May his intention to conduct a military operation in northeastern Syria, which hosts bases of Kurdish fighters, in order to establish a security zone 30 km wide along from its southern border.
The PKK and the YPG are considered terrorist movements by Ankara.
But if Turkey’s Western allies also consider the PKK to be “terrorist”, the YPG has been supported by the United States and France, particularly in the fight against the jihadists of the Islamic State group, which they drove out of Kobané in a battle that remained famous in 2015.