Turkish soldier shot dead as army and IS exchange fire

By BBC News

Turkey's military and Islamic State fighters have exchanged fire over the Syrian-Turkish border, killing one soldier, the state news agency says.

The governor of Kilis province says a border post was attacked from inside Syrian territory.
It is the latest violence to hit Kurdish-dominated south-east Turkey, three days after 32 people were killed by a bomber linked to IS in Sucur.
Also on Thursday, a Turkish traffic policeman was shot dead in Diyarbakir.
In the latest violence to strike the border:

• a Turkish soldier was shot dead by rounds fired from the Syrian side of the border
• two other Turkish soldiers were injured
• the Turkish military responded with live fire from tanks
• IS fighters were also reported to have died

The Diyarbakir police officer and a colleague were attacked while attending a collision.
The second officer was badly injured. No group has yet said that it was behind the shooting of the officers.
The two attacks on Thursday have added to the bloodshed in the area of Turkey nearest to IS-held territory.
On Monday, a suicide blast killed 32 people in the mainly Kurdish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border.
On Wednesday, two other policemen were shot dead in their home in Celanpinar, 160km (100 miles) from Suruc.
The military wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) said it was behind that attack.
They said it was revenge for the killings in Suruc, and said the men had collaborated with Islamic State (IS) fighters.
On Thursday morning, Turkish security forces arrested three people for killing the two men in Celanpinar, the state-run Anadolu Agency said.
A 20-year-old Turkish student has been identified as the suicide bomber who killed the 32 youth activists in Suruc.
The attacker, named by local media as Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz, was an ethnic Kurd from Turkey's south-eastern province of Adiyaman and reportedly had links to IS militants.
Alagoz's mother told the newspaper Radikal (in Turkish) that her son was a former student at Adiyaman university who had gone "abroad" six months ago with his brother.
"I don't know what they were doing abroad, they never said. They were just telling me they were fine," Semure Alagoz said.

Funerals for two police officers killed in Celanpinar were held on Thursday

The faces of some of the victims of the bomb blast in Suruc

A senior Turkish official told Reuters that he believed the bomber, who he did not name, had travelled to Syria last year with the help of a group linked to IS militants.
Monday's suicide bombing claimed 32 lives and injured 100 others, making it one of the deadliest attacks in Turkey in recent years.
The activists were mainly university students, who were holding a news conference when an explosion ripped through the group at the Amara Cultural Centre.
They had been planning to travel to Syria to help rebuild the town of Kobane. The youngest victim was Okan Pirinc, who was 18, according to the Turkish media.
Many in Turkey feel the government has not done enough to support the Kurds in their fight to combat the threat of IS fighters across the border in Syria - something denied by Ankara.
On Thursday, one IS fighter alleged to have crossed from Syria into Turkey was shot dead by the youth wing of the PKK in Istanbul.
The group said the man had travelled from Kobane to Istanbul for treatment seven months ago, and had been planning attacks in the city.