From combined dispatches
TUNCELI, Turkey — Kurdish rebels fatally shot 13 Turkish soldiers yesterday. It was the worst such incident in years and likely to put more pressure on the government to authorize a cross-border military strike against Kurdish bases in Iraq.
Troops killed a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) earlier yesterday in fighting in Sirnak province.
“One of our units serving in the Sirnak region … was killed in an armed attack by members of a terrorist organization,” the General Staff said on its Web site.
“The terrorists were pursued under fire by our units to escape routes out of the country to be stopped from leaving,” the statement said in an apparent reference to Iraq. Sirnak province borders Iraq.
Turkish helicopters hit rebel positions after the soldiers were killed, said security officials who declined to be identified.
About 3,000 PKK fighters are based in the mountains of northern Iraq, which they use as a base for attacks on security and civilian targets in Turkish territory. Turkey has repeatedly criticized Iraqi and U.S. authorities for failing to clamp down on PKK militants.
Last month, Ankara and Baghdad signed an agreement to help clamp down on PKK militants in Iraqi territory, but Turkish demands for permission to follow rebels across the border was rejected by Iraq under pressure from the leaders of its semiautonomous Kurdish region.
“We are not concerned with this issue because these clashes and shelling happened inside Turkish territories,” Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the government of Iraq’s Kurdish region, said yesterday. “This is a Turkish internal problem.”
Turkey’s military yesterday designated 27 “security zones” off limits to civilians in eastern and southeastern regions where the borders with Iraq and Iran converge. Starting tomorrow, the zones will be in place until Dec. 10. The military imposed similar zones in June in three southeastern provinces to keep civilians away from the fighting with the PKK.
Intense firefights between the PKK and the army have escalated in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast as the military steps up operations in the region before winter, when harsh conditions slow rebels’ movement.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed his condolences to armed forces chief Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the state-run news agency Anatolian reported.
Separately, a bomb exploded near a ferry terminal on the outskirts of Istanbul, wounding at least one policeman. Kurdish separatists, as well as al Qaeda and left-wing militants, were blamed for similar attacks against civilians and authorities in the past.
On Sept. 29, PKK members stopped a minibus in Sirnak province and killed 12 passengers. A Turkish soldier was killed in the region Saturday.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of carving out an ethnic homeland in the southeast. More than 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
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