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Within hours, Turkish warplanes bombed bases in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and which Davutoglu accused of collaborating in the car bombing.

Turkey's armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, Davutoglu said, promising that those responsible would "pay the price".

President Tayyip Erdogan also said initial findings suggested the Syrian Kurdish militia and the PKK were behind the bombing and said that 14 people had been detained.

The co-leader of the YPG's political wing denied that the affiliated YPG perpetrated the Ankara bombing and said Turkey was using the attack to justify an escalation in fighting in northern Syria.

The attack was the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State militants.

Turkey is getting dragged ever deeper into the war in neighboring Syria and is trying to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast.

The political arm of the YPG, denied involvement in the bombing, while a senior member of the PKK said he did not know who was responsible.

Hundreds of Syrian rebels with weapons and vehicles have re-entered Syria from Turkey over the last week to reinforce insurgents fending off the Kurdish-led assault on Azaz, rebel sources said on Thursday.

The YPG militia, regarded by Ankara as a hostile insurgent force deeply linked to the PKK, has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.

Turkey has said its shelling of YPG positions is a response, within its rules of engagement, to hostile fire coming across the border into Turkey, something Muslim also denied.

Turkey has been battling PKK militants in its own southeast, where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July and pitched the region into its worst bloodshed since the 1990s. Six soldiers were killed and one wounded on Thursday when a remote-controlled handmade bomb hit their vehicle, the military said.

Davutoglu named the suicide bomber as Salih Necar, born in 1992 and from the Hasakah region of northern Syria, and said he was a member of the YPG.

A senior security official said the alleged bomber had entered Turkey from Syria in July 2014, although he may have crossed the border illegally multiple times before that, and said he had contact with the PKK and Syrian intelligence.

Davutoglu also accused the Syrian government of a hand in the Ankara bombing and warned Russia, whose air strikes in northern Syria have helped the YPG to advance, against using the Kurdish militant group against Turkey.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told a teleconference with reporters that the Kremlin condemned the bombing "in the strongest possible terms".

scrappily clad in plaid shirts as well as camouflage gear, and armed with hunting rifles alongside their ancient AK-47s.

On October 11, more than 100 parachutes floated down through the night sky over northern Syria

The United States is trying to help relieve the shortage of supplies.

The YPG, a Kurdish group of some 30,000 fighters, is the senior partner in the Syrian Democratic Forces, which also includes some smaller Arab and Christian groups

instalment in a new U.S. strategy

failure

pallet of ammunition.

A Kurdish commander in the province of Hasakah confided

"train and equip"

raw courage of YPG fighters, nor of the Kurdish Women's Defense Unit (YPJ) that fights alongside them.

"They throw themselves into battle, have no sense of covering fire, just charge at the enemy," said a Dutch veteran who is now a sniper with the YPG.

Just weeks ago, a massive vehicle bomb blew up the entrance to the YPG headquarters here.

The camp appears to have been occupied by an elite squad of suicide bombers,

Kurds, Assyrian Christians, different Arab tribes. They fight together and against each other.

e.Other Arabs here resent that the Kurds were slow to join the insurgency against the regime, preferring to sit it out. Even now, the YPG co-exists with a substantial contingent of Syrian soldiers inside Hasakah city. "We have nothing to do with them, though sometimes we have an agreement not to encroach on an area," Commander Lawand told CNN inside the YPG's bombed headquarters. "We are the real opposition to the regime, but first we must fight the terror groups."That's just what the U.S. wants to hear. In the wake of its failed efforts to train and equip moderate rebel groups elsewhere in Syria, there is a lot riding on the Kurds and their Arab allies. American airstrikes were instrumental in helping the Kurds save the city of Kobani on the Turkish border and then pushing ISIS back. In a country of shifting alliances, it's a proven partnership.

A portrait of Abdullah Ocalan —the jailed leader of the PKK Kurdish separatist  movement in neighboring Turkey and founder of its many affiliates, including what evolved into the YPG—hangs in the family’s living room.

At first her father, who had been arrested several times by the Syrian government because of his membership in a Kurdish political party, resisted because of her age. But her mother knew she couldn’t stop her daughter from joining a cause they had trumpeted all her life.

As the Syrian conflict began to encroach on a corner of the country spared early in the war, the teenager traveled to a training camp in Iraq’s remote Qandil Mountains. Soon Islamic State began seizing large parts of Syria, including some Kurdish areas, and she headed to the war’s front lines.

In the years she was away, Ms. Ali only wrote three letters, sending them home via a modern day pony express by pick-up truck rather than horseback. Her mother keeps them carefully folded up in a leather wallet. One she wrote before participating in battle for the first time. The other is a poem of yearning:

The Kurds had expected it would take them weeks to defeat ISIS in Tal Abyad. In the end, victory took just two days.

stronghold of Raqqa, about 100 km south.

The people gathered here don't want to talk on camera. They say they have relatives in Raqqa, where ISIS is firmly in control.

1,000 lira (Syrian pounds -- roughly equivalent to $4.60),

In one of the ISIS security buildings, the militants' black flag still ominously dominates the walls.

Tal Abyad came under ISIS control a short while later. Rather than flee to neighboring Turkey, the family chose to stay -- begrudgingly obeying ISIS' draconian laws

The refugees have fled an offensive by Syrian government forces and Iranian-backed militias, supported by Russian air strikes, on rebel-held areas around the divided northern city of Aleppo.

More than 500 people, including dozens of civilians, have been killed since the assault began 10 days ago, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group.

Turkey has already taken in more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees over the past five years and says it will continue to do so in a "controlled fashion".

"Is there a difference between the PKK and the PYD? Is there a difference with the YPG?" he added."We have written proof! We tell the Americans: 'It's a terror group.' But the Americans stand up and say: 'No, we don't see them as terror groups.'"

"turned into a pool of blood".

There was always some inevitability to the alliance between Syrian Kurds and the regime. So isn't this just the US doing what it had to do, but at a faster pace, as Trump likes to suggest? No. As the US mission is now left with the worst of all worlds

In short, elite troops must still go after ISIS and keep Iran in check, from a much worse geographical position than before, in territory more home to Syrian Sunni Arabs. Plus, regime and Russian forces are now calling the shots with -- and depriving them of -- their angry former Kurdish allies.

Remember, NATO was formed to keep Russia's former Soviet empire in check. Now, Russian military police have unrestrained access to hundreds of kilometers of NATO's southern border, at the invitation of a NATO member.