Turkey is waging an unruly campaign to undermine popular support for the 32-year Kurdish insurgency. But rising violence casts doubt on its strategy.

A car bomb attack targeting a police bus killed seven officers and four civilians in central Istanbul on Tuesday. It was the fourth major attack in Turkey’s largest city this year. No group has claimed it, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pointed his finger at the Kurdish militants.

Turkish media said four people had been arrested but gave no details. The banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and one of its offshoots have claimed previous attacks on security forces. Yet another attack just further affirms the fact that the violence once limited to Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeast is now casting a shadow over the whole country.

An estimated 500 Turkish security personnel have been killed while fighting the Kurdish rebels since July 2015, according to the military, which claims to have killed 4,900 PKK militants in Turkey and northern Iraq. What one should be asking is how to mitigate this crisis instead of merely comparing the body count on each side – and making sure this does not escalate any further.

Whereas Davutoğlu, the former Prime Minister of Turkey sought to renew peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the search for a solution, Erdogan not only refused, but vowed to wage war until the last PKK rebels are killed. He is also now seeking to strip Kurdish lawmakers of their political immunity to make it possible to charge them with being aligned with the PKK who are fighting for semi-autonomous rule. This sort of brash and unrelenting behaviour will not appeal to an organised armed struggle, and will only give PKK more fodder to elicit support from other Kurds.

Turkey’s Kurds, who make up between 15 and 20 percent of Turkey’s 75 million people, have faced oppression and enforced cultural assimilation policies for decades. Since the PKK launched its separatist insurgency in 1984, successive Turkish governments have claimed that it relies on brutality to cow a Kurdish populace that does not fully support them. In order to appease the situation, what should be Turkey’s endgame is to not outright destroy the PKK, but rather soften it up in preparation for a return to the negotiating table – something that Turkish officials seem adamant on not doing at the moment.