Turkish PM vows to crush Kurdish rebels who launch attacks on Turkey from Iraq

Turkish PM vows to crush Kurdish rebels

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s prime minister traveled to his country’s border with Iraq to assess security on Sunday and vowed that Kurdish rebels who killed 12 Turkish soldiers in cross-border attacks will “drown in their own blood.”

Turkish warplanes bombed the hideouts of Turkish Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Saturday after the rebel attack on a Turkish military outpost on the border.

Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq have dramatically escalated their attacks on Turkish targets this month after their imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, accused Turkey of not establishing dialogue with his Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a funeral earlier Sunday for 11 of the soldiers in the southeastern city of Van, said: “They will never win. They will obtain nothing. They will drown in their own blood.”

He added that the armed forces would give the “necessary answer” to the rebels who he said were threatening the country’s stability.

An Iraqi Kurdish official on Sunday said the Turkish raid killed a teenage Iraqi Kurdish girl — the first reported civilian death in sparsely populated border areas that have been often targeted by Turkish warplanes. Karmang Ezzat, mayor of the border town of Soran, said the girl’s mother and 3-year-old brother also were wounded in the attack.

It was not clear how many Kurdish rebels might have been killed in the latest air assault but the Turkish military on Friday said about 120 rebels had been killed in air strikes and one incursion into northern Iraq over the past month. The rebels use Iraqi soil as a springboard for attacks in their war for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul is scheduled to chair a security summit in the capital, Ankara, on Monday to discuss the stepped-up rebel attacks that have fueled Turkish nationalism and led to calls for a tougher government response.

The rebel attacks have also inflicted a heavy blow on the government’s efforts to reconcile with minority Kurds by offering more cultural and political rights, including Kurdish language broadcasts on television.

Turkey, however, refuses to negotiate with the rebels and rejects their demands to declare an unconditional amnesty that would include top rebel commanders, including Ocalan, and allow the use of the Kurdish language in schools, parliament and other official settings.

Still, Erdogan said his government was determined to maintain reforms to reconcile with the Kurdish people in the hopes of ending the 26-year-old conflict that battered the country’s southeast and troubled Turkey’s bid for membership of the European Union.

“In spite of terror we will elevate our brotherhood and unity even more,” Erdogan said.

Turkey has staged several incursions into northern Iraq but the rebels always made a comeback after the troops withdrew. The last major incursion was in February 2008. The conflict has killed as many as 40,000 people since the rebels took up arms in 1984. The United States and the European Union class the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Associated Press Writers Yahya Barzanji, in Sulamaniyah, Iraq, and Gulden Alp in Ankara contributed to this report.