At least three police officers were killed and two hundred and seventeen people wounded, while eighty-five of them were police officers in the attack. The Elazig bombing followed another blast late Wednesday, also blamed on the PKK, in Turkey's eastern province of Van, which injured at least seventy-three people, including twenty police. Since July 2015, over five hundred members of Turkish security forces and thousands of PKK members have been killed in confrontations inside Turkey and in northern Iraq, and more than forty-thousand people have lost their lives in clashes with the PKK since 1984, when the group first started anti-government attacks
