Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday Kurdish militants would “drown in their own blood” as he led political and army chiefs in paying respects to troops killed in a clash with the rebels.
The fighting on Saturday, which marked a fresh escalation in the 26-year-old insurgency, killed 11 soldiers and 12 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in the southeastern province of Hakkari, near the border with Iraq.
The soldiers’ coffins, draped in red-and-white Turkish flags, were laid out on tables for a ceremony at a military base in the city of Van where Erdogan and armed forces chief General Ilker Basbug listened to a Muslim prayer with other leaders.
“Today we will not make the traitors happy,” Erdogan said. “We will defend this ground heroically. Resolute against enemies, resolute against terrorism.”
“I say here very clearly, they will not win. They will gain nothing. They will melt away in their own darkness ... they will drown in their own blood,” he said.
The death toll in Saturday’s clash was one of the highest in recent years in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people since the PKK took up arms against the state in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in the southeast.
After Saturday’s battle, the Turkish air force struck PKK targets in the mountains of northern Iraq, where several thousand of the rebels are based.
Military sources said yesterday one Turkish soldier was killed and one injured overnight in a Kurdish rebel attack on a military outpost in the southeastern province of Elazig.
They said the militants threw a hand grenade at the base before opening fire with rifles in the Palu district of Elazig.
Turkish troops entered northern Iraq overnight, penetrating 10km, after the deadly attacks, a security official said yesterday.
Three people were killed in the incursion into the Qandil mountains, where the PKK maintains rear bases for its campaign, he said.
The official did not specify whether the dead were civilians or PKK fighters, but he said that the incursion happened in the Shamarsha district of Arbil province north of the town of Sidikan.
It was the second time in five days that Turkish ground forces had crossed the border.
On Wednesday, Turkish troops crossed from Sirnak Province into Dohuk Province farther west, in their first ground operation across the border in two years.
“Two of our men were killed in the clashes that took place on Wednesday,” PKK spokesman Ahmed Denis said in the Iraqi Kurdistan regional capital of Arbil on Friday.
The intensifying clashes between the PKK and Turkish troops prompted Denis to warn on Saturday that the rebels would take their armed campaign to cities across Turkey if the army pressed on with a policy of military confrontation.
A local official said Turkish air raids in Iraq’s Kurdish north killed a teenage girl — the first reported civilian death from shelling that began last week.
Karmang Ezzat, mayor of the Soran border town, said yesterday that the girl’s mother and three-year-old brother were also wounded in the previous night’s attack.
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