Turkish military hunts down Kurdish rebels along Iraqi border in new offensive

Turkish troops hunt down Kurdish rebels

ANKARA, Turkey — Elite commando units rappelled down from helicopters, and mechanized infantry units blocked escape routes of Kurdish rebels in a major operation along the Iraqi border on Monday. Turkey’s military chief did not rule out a cross-border offensive against rebel hideouts in northern Iraq.

“It is our duty to find and eliminate terrorists wherever they are,” Gen. Ilker Basbug, head of the military, said in response to a question about the possibility of a major incursion. He said the military has been using drones, bought from Israel, over northern Iraq to monitor rebel positions over the past 10 days.

Turkish warplanes often have bombed Kurdish rebel hideouts there, and troops have crossed the border to hunt the rebels down. The last major ground incursion into Iraq was in February 2008, but the rebels made a comeback after the troops withdrew.

The military is now hoping to benefit from the use of drones to pinpoint rebel movements and inflict a heavier blow on the guerrillas along the mountainous border that is extremely difficult to control.

On the Turkish side of the border, the troops closed in on a group of rebels in a major offensive on the slopes of Kupeli and Cirav mountains in Sirnak province, bordering Iraq, the state-run Anatolia news agency said.

The Kurdish rebels, meanwhile, attacked a military unit in the nearby province of Diyarbakir, Anatolia said. A one soldier and four rebels were killed in the ensuing fighting, according to the news agency.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that Kurdish rebels who killed 12 Turkish soldiers in cross-border attacks over the weekend will “drown in their own blood.”

Turkish warplanes bombed the hideouts of Turkish Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq on Saturday, and Turkey’s civilian and military leaders met in a three-hour security summit Monday to discuss further measures and decided to improve intelligence gathering in the southeast, a statement said.

The rebels belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have used northern Iraq as a springboard to stage hit-and-run attacks on Turkish targets in their decades-long campaign for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated southeast. The Turkish military says around 4,000 rebels are based just across the border in Iraq and that about 2,500 operate inside Turkey.

For years, the rebels have battled NATO’s second-largest army by mining roads, ambushing patrols and even booby-trapping the bodies of dead comrades. They trained their Russian-made SA-7 surface-to-air missiles on Turkish helicopters. They fired Russian RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades at military trucks. They camouflaged their scent with black pepper to throw off the army’s guard dogs.

The Turkish military ratcheted up its pressure, improving its tactics and its equipment to fight a guerrilla war, began using helicopter gunships to blast rebel hideouts and paved dirt roads to prevent rebels from planting mines while deploying jammers against remote-controlled roadside bombs.

Soldiers began using night-vision goggles and thermal cameras. They learned to hide their cigarettes in soda cans so that snipers couldn’t target the burning tips. Boots were strengthened with steel to protect against land mines.

Gen. Basbug, speaking to reporters in the western city of Canakkale, rejected allegations that an intelligence failure led to a cross-border rebel raid that left nine of the soldiers dead on Saturday. He said the soldiers had noticed some movement in the area prior to the surprise attack, but it was not possible to positively identify them as guerrillas.

Hurriyet newspaper, citing military authorities, said the troops opened fire but the rebels kept their silence and fired the first rocket-propelled grenade two hours later on the Turkish unit at Gediktepe, a hill overlooking a narrow border crossing, at an altitude of 2,540 meters (8,330 feet). It said Kurdish rebels then opened fire with heavy machine guns from positions across the border.

Basbug said about 60 rebels attacked Gediktepe and the total number of assailants, including those across the border, could be around 100.

Turkish soldiers gained the upper hand in mid-1990s, chasing guerrillas into remote hideouts and across the border into their bases in northern Iraq, but cross-border offensives failed to defeat the group as the rebels continued to recruit young Kurdish men and women in the poor southeast. The military and civilian leaders acknowledged that the country’s military drive alone would not end the insurgency.

Turkey captured the leader of the PKK rebels in 1999 in Kenya and under pressure from the European Union, the government recently embarked on efforts to reconcile with minority Kurds by granting more cultural rights.

But a dramatic escalation of rebel attacks over the past month seriously endangered the government’s reconciliation efforts after imprisoned rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan accused Turkey of not establishing dialogue with his outlawed group.

That sparks fears of new Kurdish rebel suicide attacks or bombings in tourist resorts and cities, as in the past. Police stepped up security measures across the nation. Plainclothes officers conducted body searches during a funeral for a soldier killed by the rebels at Ankara’s main mosque on Sunday as snipers took positions on rooftops of surrounding buildings.

As many as 40,000 people, mostly guerrillas, have died in fighting since 1984. Hundreds of thousands of people have deserted the southeast because of the war and economic hardship.

Associated Press Writer Burhan Ozbilici in Ankara contributed to this report.