U.S. intelligence was behind a terrorist attack mounted by the PKK on a defense firm in the Turkish capital Ankara on Wednesday, according to British politician George Galloway.
In a recent streaming speech, Galloway claimed the CIA "used" the PKK for the attack on Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) that killed five and wounded 22.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 to achieve a so-called Kurdish self-rule in southeastern regions and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the U.S. and the European Union.
It operates a local offshoot, the YPG, in northern Syria, where it is allied with the U.S. to fight against Daesh terrorists and justifies its presence as a frontier against remnants of Daesh, a major strain on Turkish-American relations.
The PKK has claimed the Ankara attack, and Turkish authorities confirmed the man and the woman who carried it out as PKK members.
Galloway, former MP and current leader of the Workers Party of Britain, suggested the attack’s timing was not a coincidence, which was launched while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was visiting Russia’s southwestern city of Kazan for the BRICS Summit.
"The CIA could have operated the PKK to launch a major terrorist attack in Ankara minutes after the president of Türkiye touched down in Kazan, with the application to join BRICS in his pocket," Galloway said.
Erdoğan himself raised a similar point last week, hitting out at the group for "seeking the patronage of certain Western countries" and arguing the U.S. was "using" the region’s terrorist groups to serve American interests.
Galloway claimed it is "driving them crazy that a NATO member and a candidate member of the EU might join BRICS, this new phenomenon which is reshaping the world."
Türkiye announced last month it formally applied to join the group of emerging market nations.
The move, economically motivated, was also due to "frustration over a lack of progress" in its decades-old bid to join the EU, which has been essentially frozen since 2005.
BRICS is an acronym for its five founding members, although the alliance added four nations this year, three from the Middle East, including Iran, which the West says is supplying Russia with drones to use against Ukraine.
Most of the BRICS members are sharply at odds with the West over the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and in the case of Beijing and Moscow, also its stance on the Ukraine war.
The BRICS nations represent just under half of the world's population and around a third of the global gross domestic product. As a "platform," it does not impose binding economic obligations on members, as does the EU.
If admitted, Türkiye would be the first NATO member in a bloc that sees itself as a counterweight to Western powers.
Ankara sees BRICS as an opportunity for more economic cooperation with member states rather than an alternative to its Western ties and NATO membership.