Far-left group takes responsibility for shooting at U.S. consulate in Turkey

ISTANBUL – A far-left extremist group took responsibility for an armed assault Monday by two women on the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, part of a wave of attacks that struck Turkey amid escalating violence.

No U.S. personnel were injured in the shooting incident outside the heavily fortified mission, but the consulate said that it was closing until further notice, according to Turkish media accounts.

The Marxist-oriented Revolutionary People’s Liberation Army-Front announced that it was behind Monday’s attack, calling the United States an “archenemy” of the Middle East in a statement.

The group, considered a terrorist organization by both U.S. and Turkish officials, had previously taken responsibility for a 2013 suicide bombing outside the American Embassy in Ankara, the capital, that left a Turkish security guard dead.

Earlier accounts had described the assailants in Monday’s consulate attack as a man and a woman, but authorities later identified both as women. One of them, who was wounded in the shootout, was captured by police in a nearby building, the state media reported.

Video footage on Turkish TV showed the woman, cornered in a building, refusing to surrender and shouting, “I did it for my party!” before she was shot by a police officer.

The second assailant apparently managed to escape despite a police dragnet in the area, on the European side of the Bosporus waterway, which divides Turkey’s largest city.

The assault at the consulate came hours after a large car bomb exploded about 1 a.m. outside a police station across town in another Istanbul neighborhood, Sultanbeyli, on the Asian side of the city. The blast injured three police officers and seven civilians, according to official and media reports.

As police were searching the heavily damaged scene, authorities said, gunmen opened fire, killing the chief of a bomb disposal unit.

Both suspects in the police station attack were killed in an exchange of gunfire, police said.

It was not clear if the two attacks were related. No one took immediate responsibility for the police station assault.

Elsewhere in Turkey, four police officers were reported killed and another seriously injured in a roadside bomb explosion in the southeastern Turkish province of Sirnak. In a separate attack in the same province, the military said, a soldier was killed when militants opened fire on a military helicopter.

Authorities suspect the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in both of the attacks in the southeast, according to Turkish media.

The spike in attacks is unfolding as the U.S. and Turkey are working on a new plan to battle Islamic State militants in Syria, which shares a more than 500-mile-long border with Turkey.