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TUNCELI, Turkey, June 24 (Reuters) - Five rebel
fighters of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
were killed and one Turkish security guard was
injured during an armed clash on Friday, officials
said.
The clash took place in a heavily forested area near
the town of Bingol in Turkey's mainly Kurdish
southeast region.
The officials said some 2,000 soldiers were seeking
to flush out between 15 and 20 guerrillas active in
the area. The operation was launched on Thursday and
continued on Friday.
"We expect the number of dead PKK (rebels) to
increase by evening," a military source in the
region said.
Separately, a civilian taxi driver in the town of
Tunceli was seriously wounded when his vehicle hit a
remote-controlled mine planted in a city street,
another official said.
Another 3,000 Turkish security forces, backed by
helicopter gunships, have undertaken a sweeping
operation in Tunceli province, he added, but offered
no further details.
Security officials have said that a large number of
PKK rebels have entered Turkey from Iraq in recent
months armed with C-4 plastic explosives used to
create homemade mines.
At least seven people have been killed in the
southeast this month alone by such ordinance. Dozens
of people have died in the past few months in
clashes between PKK guerrillas and Turkish security
forces, stirring fears of a return to the kind of
large-scale violence which plagued southeast Turkey
in the 1980s and 1990s.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in
1984 in a bid to carve out an ethnic homeland and
more than 30,000 people, mostly Kurds, have died in
the ensuing conflict.
Fighting dropped off sharply after the 1999 capture
of PKK commander Abdullah Ocalan. But the end of the
PKK's unilateral ceasefire last year has seen a
steady increase in clashes.
Reuters
Five Kurdish rebels killed in Turkey clash (AFP)
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, June 24 (AFP) - 11h16 -
Fresh clashes in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast
have left five Kurdish rebels dead and a Turkish
soldier wounded, officials said Friday.
The five militants from the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK) were killed in fighting in a
mountainous area near Karliova town in the province
of Bingol early Friday, security sources said.
They had fled to the area following a clash in the
neighboring province of Tunceli on Thursday, in
which a soldier was wounded, they said.
Also in Tunceli, a taxi driver was seriously injured
when his vehicle ran on a mine planted on a rural
road by PKK rebels, the Anatolia news agency
reported.
Violence in the region has sharply increased over
the past few months, after the PKK called off a
five-year unilateral ceasefire in June 2004 on
grounds that reforms undertaken by Ankara to expand
Kurdish freedoms were insufficient.
The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed about
37,000 lives, most of them between 1984 and 1999,
when the PKK waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish
self-rule in the region.
AFP
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