ISTANBUL, 26 December 2007 — Turkey’s military has hit more than 200 Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq since Dec. 16, killing hundreds of rebels, authorities said yesterday.

Up to 175 rebels were killed on Dec. 16 alone in “unprotected buildings” in the mountainous areas in northern Iraq, the military said in a statement posted on its website.

The death toll did not include those who were killed in hide-outs and caves, and scores of rebels wounded in the operations were taken to hospitals in Iraq’s northern cities, it said.

Other hide-outs and anti-aircraft weapons were struck in a cross-border air assault on Dec. 22, followed by artillery fire from within Turkey.

Iraqi officials said the Dec. 16 operation — the first confirmed by Turkey since the US-led invasion in 2003 — violated Iraqi sovereignty.

Turkey says it was targeting separatist rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in the operations.

“A total of 33 sets of targets (more than 200 individual targets) exclusively used by the terrorists were hit by our warplanes and our artillery,” the statement said of the first cross-border operation. Among the targets of the first operation were 14 weapons storage, two training camps, nine logistical facilities, three commanding bases and 182 hide-outs used by the rebels and they were all demolished, it said.

That operation was followed by an incursion by ground forces, who spotted a group of Kurdish rebels preparing to cross into Turkey. The Turkish military released photographs and footage which the military said were shot from planes before and after the air assaults.

The pictures were mostly too blurry to distinguish spots marked as rebel facilities by the military. But in some of them, purported camp areas and buildings that were demolished could be seen. The last confirmed offensive across the Turkish-Iraqi border came last Saturday, when Turkish airplanes entered Iraqi airspace and bombed suspected rebel targets.

A spokesman for Iraqi Kurdistan’s Peshmerga security forces said earlier that Turkish fighter jets bombed Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq on Sunday too.

But a US official in Ankara said yesterday that there was no evidence the Turkish military had carried out an air assault on northern Iraq on Sunday.