Nine killed in raid on suspected ISIL cell in Turkey

Turkey claimed it struck a major blow against an Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) cell in a raid Monday in which seven suspected members of the group were reportedly killed. Two police officers also died in the clash, in southeastern Turkey, police said.

The officers were killed by booby-trap bombs as they broke down a door during a predawn operation launched on "three or four houses" used by an ISIL cell in the city of Diyarbakir, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said. A dozen suspected members were detained, he said. Five other officers were wounded during the raid.

"It was an important operation ... An important Daesh group was neutralized," he said, using an alternative name for ISIL. He said police acted on intelligence collected by Turkish security agencies since Friday.

It was not immediately clear if the operation was linked to two suicide bombings of a peace rally in the capital, Ankara, earlier this month that killed 102 people. One of the bombers was identified as an ISIL member whose brother blew himself up in a similar deadly attack near Turkey's border with Syria in July.

The government — which is frequently accused of having ignored for too long ISIL's use of Turkish territory for activities in Syria — has come under intense criticism for failing to prevent the attack on the rally. Media reports said the bomber who has been identified was known to authorities as a possible suicide attacker.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have suggested, however, that a "cocktail" of armed groups — including ISIL, Turkey's Kurdish rebels and others — was behind the peace rally attack.

Analysts are skeptical about claims of Kurdish rebel involvement because many Kurdish activists attended the Oct. 10 peace rally, and some were among the dead and injured. Many see the claim as a government attempt to deflect blame for the attacks before Turkey's Nov. 1 elections.

Erdogan repeated the claim during a campaign rally on Sunday, calling the Ankara attacks "a collective terrorist act." He said the aim was to stabilize Turkey.

Video footage from the news agency Dogan showed armored police vehicles in Diyarbakir sealed off a road where police launched the raid, and heavy gunfire could be heard in the background.

Kurtulmus said authorities were trying to identify the dead suspects, establish possible links to ISIL members in other Turkish cities and determine how many were Turkish and how many came from abroad.

The Associated Press