ISTANBUL -- Kurdish militias carried out a suicide attack on a Turkish military police station in eastern Turkey on Sunday, killing two soldiers and wounding 31 others, local authorities said.
New rules were also announced that allow the use of U.S. air power in neighboring Syria to defend U.S.-trained Syrian rebels if they come under attack from terrorist groups or President Bashar Assad's regime.
In an overnight assault, members of the separatist Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, rammed a tractor loaded with 2 tons of explosives into the station in the Dogubeyazit district of Agri province, close to Turkey's border with Iran, the local governor's office said in a statement.
The attack caused extensive damage to the building, the governor's office statement said. The military said four of the injured soldiers were in serious condition.
The attack comes at a time of heightened tensions between the armed group and the Turkish state, after the collapse of a two-year cease-fire and Turkey's resumption of air raids on Kurdistan Worker's Party targets in northern Iraq.
At least 24 people have been killed in the renewed violence in Turkey, most of them soldiers.
In 2013, both sides had reached a truce when Turkey vowed to grant its Kurdish minority greater rights and autonomy in exchange for a cease-fire after a three-decade insurgency that claimed more than 40,000 lives.
Turkish officials in Ankara said the crackdown against the Kurdistan Worker's Party, which also included hundreds of arrests across Turkey, was in response to increased violence carried out by the group over the past month.
Ankara began raids against the group July 24 after its members killed two police officers in retaliation for a suicide attack in the southeast town of Suruc last month that was carried out against Kurdish activists by a Turkish citizen with suspected ties to the Islamic State. The Kurdistan Worker's Party accused Turkish authorities of facilitating the attack.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Friday said Turkey would not accept a cease-fire as people are being "martyred," adding that the operations would continue as long as the group continued to threaten the country's national security.
But in an opinion column published in The Washington Post, Davutoglu said Turkey was still committed to pushing forward with a peace process.
"All terrorist organizations that target Turkey must know that their acts will not go unpunished and that we will respond to their acts with full resolve, as we have every right to under international law," Davutoglu wrote.
"This is not to say that the process of seeking a solution is over; on the contrary, I am determined to take it forward, as rapidly as I am able, to its logical conclusion once a new government is in place in Turkey," he added.
The escalating conflict between the Kurdistan Worker's Party and Turkey has also roiled the neighboring Kurdistan region of Iraq, where officials said that renewed Turkish airstrikes on the group over the weekend had hit residential areas and caused civilian deaths.
Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency has said that some 260 rebels were killed in air raids against Kurdish separatist targets in northern Iraq. The Kurdistan Worker's Party has not reported on its casualties. Kurdish activists said, however, that the Turkish airstrikes had destroyed at least six homes in the town of Zargel on Saturday, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 12.
The military said Sunday that the area struck was not a village but a worker's party shelter. It insisted there was no civilian settlement within the targeted region.
Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan's semiautonomous regional government, said Saturday that the separatist group should "keep the battlefield away from the Kurdish region, to ensure the civilians of Kurdistan don't become victims of that fighting and conflict."
He also repeated his call to the Turks to stop the bombing and push for a political solution. Some Iraqi outlets reported that Barzani had asked the Kurdistan Worker's Party to leave Iraqi Kurdistan entirely; his office denied that.
That could have a subsequent effect of disrupting the military efforts of the group's affiliate in Syria, the People's Protection Units, known as the YPG, which has been one of the most effective groups battling the Islamic State and has become the most reliable partner on the ground for the U.S.-led coalition conducting airstrikes.
Along with its efforts to combat the Kurdistan Worker's Party, Turkey has also stepped up its fight against the Islamic State. Last month, the Turkish military engaged in its first cross-border confrontation with militants, while carrying out airstrikes on its targets in Syria. Ankara also granted permission to the U.S. to use Turkish airbases as part of its bombardment campaign against the Islamic State.
When asked by the BBC if the group could expect to stay forever in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Kurdish official was equivocal, saying the aim was a political end to fighting with Turkey that would obviate the need for the Iraqi Kurdistan bases.
The leftist Kurdistan Worker's Party has long been headquartered in Iraqi Kurdistan but has a wary relationship and ideological differences with the main Iraqi Kurdish parties. Nonetheless, most Kurds are united against the Islamic State, and Barzani's regional government has supported the expanding role of the People's Protection Units in battling the extremist group.
Barzani was said to have played a role in easing tension with Turkey as the People's Protection Units battled the Islamic State in the Syrian Kurdish border town Kobani last year -- and in persuading Turkey to open limited supply lines to the People's Protection Units and to the Kurdish communities that the group was defending. His government also sent Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters through Turkey to Kobani to reinforce the Syrian Kurds. Barzani's government also supplied arms that were airdropped to the People's Protection Units by aircraft of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, and trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies and bearing portraits of Barzani on their hoods drove from Iraqi Kurdistan through Turkey and into Syria during that battle.
Safeen Dazai, a spokesman for the Kurdistan regional government, said he did not know of any impact on the anti-Islamic State effort in Syria so far as a result of the Turkish strikes in Iraq, denying any knowledge of the Kurdistan Worker's Party sending supplies or fighters from Iraq into Syria. In practice, fighters easily cross in and out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
The separatist fighters have been taking back territory from the Islamic State in areas near the Turkish and Iraqi borders -- important to Iraq's battle with the Islamic State because it removes some of their strategic depth around nearby Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, which the Islamic State has designated its capital.
Officials of Iraq's central government are eager to embrace any available allies against the Islamic State -- including the separatists -- and have called the Turkish strikes a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
U.S. air power
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has authorized the use of air power to defend U.S.-trained Syrian rebels if they come under attack from terrorist groups or the Assad regime, deepening the U.S. role against Islamic State forces in Syria.
The broader U.S. rules of engagement, approved Friday, came after rebels fighting the Islamic State were attacked by the Nusra Front, an al-Qaida offshoot, in northern Syria, a U.S. defense official said. The U.S. provided close air support to protect the rebels and quash the attack, he said.
While airstrikes remain limited to Islamic State targets for offensive operations, they can now be used to defend U.S. allies on the ground in Syria, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The official discounted the risk of a U.S. confrontation with the regime of Assad, should he choose to attack any American-trained forces on the ground. The U.S.-trained rebels, who number about 60, have pledged to fight only the Islamic State, not the Assad government, and Assad must focus on other threats to his regime, the official said.
Alistair Baskey, a National Security Council spokesman, said U.S.-trained rebels "are being provided with a wide range of coalition support" that includes defensive strikes.
While declining to discuss the specific rules of engagement, Baskey said the administration has "said all along that we would take the steps necessary to ensure that these forces could successfully carry out their mission."
Obama's move was first reported Sunday by the Wall Street Journal.
Information for this article was contributed by Ceylan Yeginsu, Anne Barnard, Falih Hassan and Omar al-Jawoshy of The New York Times; by Suzan Fraser of The Associated Press; and by David Lerman of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 08/03/2015