Turkish Jets Pound Kurdish Region

by Mahmoud Abu Ghosh

Turkish warplanes have bombed several targets in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, Ankara’s military revealed Sunday.In the second cross-border airstrike in just over a week, the jets hit caves and other suspected rebel shelters in the Zap and Hakurk regions in an operation that began late Saturday, an army statement said.

All planes safely returned to base following the “effective” operation, the military said, but it did not provide any details about casualties or damage caused to the targets.

A Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) spokesman told The Associated Press that the warplanes started striking at midnight and that four villages in the area were also exposed to artillery shelling.

Bahtiyar Dogan said the areas targeted were “farms, villages and old bases, which are not used by the PKK any more,” adding that there were no casualties among PKK fighters or the villagers.Dogan said the airstrikes were in response to a recent PKK attack that allegedly resulted in dozens of Turkish military casualties.

It was not clear if Dogan was referring to clashes in Hakkari province on February 9, during which Turkish officials said one soldier was killed and six others were wounded.

Turkish authorities also said troops killed four rebels in that clash.

The PKK has long used northern Iraq as a base for hit-and-run attacks inside Turkey. The conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people since 1984.

The PKK, which began its armed struggle to liberate northern Kurdistan from Turkish rule in 1984, is officially labeled a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, which supplies Super-Cobra helicopters and Predator drones to Turkey for use against Kurdish resistance fighters.

Turkey’s air force has launched dozens of lethal strikes on suspected rebel targets in northern Iraq since August, the latest on February 3 when its jets hit alleged rebel hideouts.

Turkish F-16s, led by an American drone controlled by US personell in Nevada, killed 35 Kurdish smugglers in December after apparently mistaking the teenagers for resistance fighters. The incident was one of the largest one-day civilian death tolls during Turkey’s 27-year war against the Kurds.

Over 45,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed in the conflict since 1984.