MORE than 150 Kurdish rebels were killed in a Turkish military cross-border air raid into northern Iraq last week, officials in Turkey said yesterday.
Turkish warplanes successfully hit all their intended targets in a three-hour air operation on Mount Qandil in Iraq, the military said in a written statement. The air raid ended early Friday, it said.
It had earlier reported that its warplanes bom
bed havens of the Kurdish rebel group PKK deep inside Iraq but did not give any figures for rebel casualties.
"According to initial assessments, more than 150 terrorists were rendered inefficient and the operation led to panic among the members of the terrorist organisation," the statement said.
The military generally refers to killed rebels by saying they have been "rendered inefficient" – a euphemism designed to distance Turkish soldiers from the brutality of killing.
On Friday the military released footage of the raid. It said 43 rebel targets, including 29 shelters, were attacked.
Then it said only that "a large number" of rebels had been killed. That was disputed by a rebel spokesman, who said no rebels had been killed or injured.
Military sources told Reuters that at least 30 warplanes were involved in the raids, in the remote, mountainous area of Iraq. An official from Iraqi president Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party said villagers told him four rebels were killed in the operation.
The Baghdad government has protested against earlier Turkish air strikes in northern Iraq. Turkey, like the United States and the European Union, lists the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, as a terrorist organisation.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 in an effort to win self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish south-east. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people in the years since.
The group maintains bases in the north of Iraq, which it uses as a launch pad for attacks against targets inside Turkey.
The PKK's leadership is believed to be hiding in the Qandil region – about 60 miles from the Turkish border. Turkey blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 40,000 people.
The Turkish military has launched several air assaults on Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq in recent months.
In February, it staged a major ground offensive that lasted eight days. Since then, clashes between rebels and Turkish troops have erupted along Turkey's border with Iraq.
The February incursion, during which the army said it killed 240 guerrillas and lost 27 of its own men, lasted eight days.
Until the most recent air raid, the military had not announced an operation that penetrated into Iraq as far as Mount Qandil.
The chief foreign policy adviser to Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan met the leader of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region last week. It was the first direct high-level contact between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdish region.
The Turkish envoy, Ahmet Davutoglu, met Talabani before separately meeting Nerchivan Barzani, Iraqi officials said.
"This is the first time a meeting has taken place between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan government," said Falah Mustafa, foreign policy chief in the Kurdish regional government.
A statement from the office of Jalal Talabani, who hosted the meeting, said: "The two delegations met and they discussed mutual relations between the two sides and studied the problems and anxiety which has coloured relations between them in the past."
The full article contains 570 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
