TUNCELI, Turkey, 25 June 2005 — Five rebel fighters of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were killed and one Turkish security guard was injured during an armed clash yesterday, 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 yesterday. “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.
