Military jets strike PKK targets after major attack

Turkey's military said on Monday its warplanes bombarded Kurdistan Workers' Party targets overnight after the militants staged a deadly attack in which 16 Turkish soldiers were reportedly killed.

The PKK said it had killed 15 troops in Sunday's attack on an armed convoy in the Daglica area of Hakkari province, near the Iraqi border, in what would be the bloodiest assault since the collapse of a cease-fire in July.

"Two of our armored vehicles suffered heavy damage after the detonation of handmade explosives on the road. As a result of the blast, there were martyrs and wounded among our heroic armed comrades," the Turkish military said, without specifying a death toll.

Two F-16 and two F-14 jets had struck 13 PKK targets, and military operations were continuing "decisively" despite poor weather, it said.

The clashes mark a crescendo in a stream of deadly attacks since July, which officials said had already claimed the lives of more than 70 members of the security services and hundreds of PKK militants.

Several Turkish soldiers were killed and more wounded in a major attack in southeastern Hakkari province carried out by PKK militants, the military said on Monday.

The Turkish Air Force immediately scrambled warplanes to strike PKK targets in southeast Turkey in retaliation, marking a further intensification in the latest flare-up of the decadeslong conflict.

In a sign of the gravity of the attack on Sunday, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu broke off a trip to Konya to watch a national soccer game and summoned an emergency security meeting in Ankara, the official Anatolia agency said.

The army said the PKK attack on two military vehicles in a convoy in Daglica district of Hakkari - a known stronghold of the Kurdish militants - had killed several soldiers and wounded others.

"Two of our armored vehicles were severely damaged by improvised explosive devices left on the road," the army said, adding: "Some of our brave soldiers were killed and others injured as a result of the explosion."

Reuters - AFP

(China Daily 09/08/2015 page11)