The echoes of the blast in around Cizre had hardly faded by the time Turkey imposed a ban on much of the reporting of the latest attack on its police force in the nation's war-torn south.

As the death toll climbed and the scores of wounded choked local hospital facilities, Turkey's government seemed reluctant to make a very obvious point: "This is why we don't want the Kurds growing in regional strength."

The attack in Cizre will be blamed on the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party.

Image: The bomb blast left the police building badly damaged

The movement has been fighting for autonomy for decades and has, especially in Turkey's view, sister organisations in Iraq, and especially in Syria.

This week Turkish troops backed by Arab Syrian rebels seized the Syrian border town of Jarablus from the so-called Islamic State.


Turkey's real aim was to prevent it falling to the Kurds, who have been expanding their own liberated territory across northern Syria along the border with Turkey.

Ankara has decided to keep journalists and independent observers out of Cizre - perhaps because drawing attention to the latest attack against its security forces may also reveal the extent to which the Kurdish town has been levelled in 12 months of fighting.

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The Kurds' separatist campaign has been bloody.

It has focused most of its efforts on frequent attacks against the military - including car bombs in the capital aimed at ministry of defence employees.

The state response has been brutal.

Over the last year Turkey has used tanks and helicopter gunships in Cizre and elsewhere destroyed apartment blocks and entrenched an already fierce sense of grievance among the nation's 20 to 25 million Kurds, who make up 18% of the population.

Two years ago Kurdish politicians serving in the parliament and the ruling Justice and Development Party of President Tayyib Erdogan were both hopeful of establishing an enduring peace.

Those hopes have been swept away by a level of violence that at times has resembled the wars in nearby Syria.

Young Kurds, some of them part of a tough youth movement that pulled away from the PKK old guard, fought pitched battles in Cizre, Sirnak and Nusaybin losing hundreds of fighters and civilians, while dozens of police and solders were also killed.