Two female militants were killed during the climax of a siege in Turkey’s biggest city. The women, thought to be members of a banned hard-left terrorist group, attacked a police bus with grenades and a machine gun in the Bayrampasa district of Istanbul yesterday morning.
They fled to a nearby apartment when police officers returned fire and holed up there. Special forces evacuated the area and surrounded the building before storming in and shooting the women dead. The pair had ignored calls to surrender.
Video footage released by a Turkish news agency shows the two young women dressed in jeans and hooded tops running towards the police bus before the attack. Helicopters were scrambled to track them as they escaped. Vahip Sahin, governor of Istanbul, said that two police officers were wounded during the attack and siege.
Police identified the women as Cigdem Yaksi and Berna Yilmaz. They are believed to have been members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a leftist organisation that is listed as a terror group in Turkey, the United States and Europe and which has a strong presence in parts of Istanbul.
The Marxist-Leninist group was formed in the mid-1990s after a split in Turkey’s long-established militant left.
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Its members are anti-western and oppose Turkey’s membership of Nato and its relations with the US. The group has claimed responsibility for scores of attacks on government and foreign targets in Turkey; however it is best known for its poor organisation and bungled attacks. In many cases, the perpetrators have been the only victims.
Last March, two gunmen burst into a courthouse in Istanbul and took a state prosecutor hostage. All three were killed during a police operation to end the siege.
Yesterday’s incident is the latest in a string of terror attacks. A car bomb that killed 29 soldiers in Ankara last month was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a splinter group of the PKK, a Kurdish group that has been fighting the Turkish state for three decades.
Renewed fighting flared in southeast Turkey last summer, as PKK youth militants used homemade bombs against the security forces.
Islamic State has carried out four bombings in Turkey in nine months, including the deadliest terror attack in the history of the modern republic, when 103 people were killed by suicide bombers at a peace rally in Ankara in October.