Twenty-eight people were killed and dozens wounded in Turkey's capital Ankara on Wednesday when a car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses near the armed forces' headquarters, parliament and other government buildings. The Turkish military condemned what it described as a terrorist attack on the buses as they waited at traffic lights in the administrative heart of the NATO member's capital. The attack, the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State, comes as Turkey gets dragged ever deeper into the war in neighboring Syria and tries to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast. President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey's determination to fight those behind such acts would only get stronger and that it would not hesitate to exercise its right to self defense. "We will continue our fight against the pawns that carry out such attacks, which know no moral or humanitarian bounds, and the forces behind them with more determination every day," he said in a written statement.

It has also been battling PKK militants in its own southeast where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July, plunging the region into its worst violence since the 1990s. The PKK, which has fought a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, has frequently attacked military targets in the past, although it has largely focused its campaign on the mainly Kurdish southeast.

More than 100 people died in Ankara last October in an attack blamed on Islamic State, when two suicide bombers struck a rally of pro-Kurdish and labor activists outside the capital's main train station.

A suicide bombing in the historic heart of Istanbul in January, also blamed on Islamic State, killed 10 German tourists, while a bomber killed more than 30 people in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border last July.