Turkish troops and Kurdish militants clashed in southeast Turkey yesterday in an escalation of violence that killed 10 soldiers and 12 rebels.
The battle at Semdinli in Hakkari Province, near the border with Iraq, re-kindled the conflict in the region and prompted the armed forces to hit Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets inside northern Iraq.
The PKK militants touched off the fighting with an attack on an army border unit at about 2am and 14 soldiers were wounded, the General Staff said in a statement on its Web site. The wounded have been transferred to hospitals.
“Reinforcements were sent to the region and throughout the night, support was provided to the conflict zone by attack helicopters and artillery. Separately, the Air Force struck targets identified in the northern region of Iraq,” it said.
Eight soldiers were killed in the attack on the military base and two further soldiers died when they trod on a landmine in Hakkari.
“Our fight will continue until the terrorist organization has been annihilated,” Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said.
Far-right Nationalist Movement Party leader Devlet Bahceli said Erdogan was the architect of the current situation. He called for a meeting tomorrow of the National Security Council and the re-introduction of a state of emergency in southeast Turkey, which ended in 2002, when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party came to power.
The military warned on Friday the PKK might intensify its operations over the summer, when warmer weather brings increased infiltration of PKK guerrillas from the mountains of northern Iraq. Several thousand rebels are based there.
Before the latest battle, some 130 militants were estimated to have been killed in the past four months — mostly in an air raid on northern Iraq, the military told a press briefing.
Forty-three security personnel were killed in the period.
PKK activity often takes the form of remote-control bomb attacks on military convoys, raids on small outposts and firefights in the mountains of southeast Turkey.
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