News / Turkey

'Over 100 PKK militants' killed or injured in clashes with Turkish security forces

Saturday, 03 September 2016 6:07 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 04 September 2016 8:02 AM ]

Turkish soldiers block the road at a military check point in Diyarbakir on June 26, 2016. © AFP

More than 100 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group have been killed or wounded in clashes with Turkish army forces in the restive southeastern part of the country.

Turkish military said in a statement on Saturday that over 100 PKK militants had been “neutralized” during the clashes, without specifying how many were killed and how many wounded.

The casualty toll from Saturday’s clashes was one of the highest in a single day of the conflict in recent years.

Turkish forces suffered a bloody 24 hours after 13 soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in three separate incidents in the country’s east and southeast, blamed on Kurdish militants.

Three soldiers were killed and 20 others wounded during a clean-up operation against the PKK in the southeastern province of Hakkari on Saturday morning.

Another eight soldiers were killed during clashes with the Kurdish militants in the eastern province of Van on Friday. Eight others sustained injures during the operation.

And late on Friday, two soldiers and a village guard were killed in an attack on a military post in restive eastern provinces of Mardin.

Turkish military forces have been conducting ground operations as well as airstrikes against PKK positions in Turkey’s troubled southeastern border region and Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region over the past year.

The campaign began following the July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc, which claimed more than 30 civilian lives. Turkish officials held the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group responsible for the act of terror.

PKK militants, who accuse the Ankara government of supporting Daesh, launched a string of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish security forces after the bomb attack, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

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