Turkish F-16 air force jets on Friday evening took off from their base on a new mission to bomb targets controlled by Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists in Syria, television reports said, according to AFP.
The war planes took off from their base in the southeastern city in Diyarbakir to carry out a second wave of strikes against ISIS, the news agency reported, citing the CNN-Turk and NTV television channels.
This marks the second time in less than 24 hours that Turkish fighter jets bombed ISIS targets in Syria, the first such attack having taken place early Friday morning.
After a wave of violence in the country, the government has also vowed to take action against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) separatists who have claimed attacks on the security forces in the last days.
NTV said that Turkish war planes had also set off on a separate but simultaneous mission to bomb PKK military camps at their base in Kurdish-ruled northern Iraq.
A PKK spokesman later confirmed the report, saying that Turkish warplanes had bombed military positions of the PKK in Iraq.
"At around 11:00 pm (2000 GMT) tonight, Turkish warplanes started bombing our positions near the border, accompanied by heavy artillery shelling," PKK spokesman in Iraq Bakhtiar Dogan told AFP.
Turkey’s airstrikes came hours after Ankara agreed to expand its cooperation with the United states in the fight against ISIS terrorists in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
The Wall Street Journal and Turkish dailies Zaman and Hurriyet reported that Turkey will allow the U.S. military to launch airstrikes against the fighters from Incirlik Air Base in eastern Turkey.
Earlier this week, a suicide attack attributed to ISIS in the town of Suruc near the border with Syria killed 32 people.
It was the deadliest attack in Turkey since 2013, and if ISIS involvement is confirmed, would be the group's first suicide attack on Turkish soil.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)