ANKARA: Turkish warplanes bombed a Kurdish rebel hide-out in northern Iraq yesterday, destroying the base and killing an unspecified number of militants, the military said. The airstrike followed a deadly bomb attack in Istanbul at the weekend, which some observers have attributed to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The “intensive” bombing targeted a large cave in the Qandil Mountains, along the Iraqi-Iranian border, and up to 40 PKK militants taking refuge there, the army statement said.
“The cave was completely destroyed and most of the militants who were inside and outside the cave were rendered ineffective,” it said.
A second PKK target, in the Zap region along the Turkish border, was bombed, the statement said, without giving further details. Zap and the Qandil Mountains are both major PKK strongholds. An official of the autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Iraq said that the Kali Birdan area of the Qandil Mountains had been the target of Turkish air raids yesterday and that villages had been hit.
“Turkish planes bombed the villages near Kali Birdan, where there are only families who earn their living raising sheep,” said Sinksar Abdullah, a top official of the region.
“This is the first time that Turkish planes have attacked during the day,” Abdullah said. “We have not received any information about casualties.” The strike followed two bomb blasts in a crowded Istanbul street on Sunday evening, which killed 17 people, among them five children, and left more than 150 wounded.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday called for unity in the face of terrorism and vowed that those responsible for Sunday’s bomb blast would be brought to justice. “Terror has shown its true face (but) they will not achieve their dark aims,” Erdogan told party colleagues in Ankara. “We shall overcome these difficult days and come together in days for which we are worthy.”
Erdogan refused to name whom he believed to be behind the blast, instead calling on the media to allow the police and intelligence services to complete their work. As the families of the dead continued funeral preparations, police were seeking a man in a black shirt who was captured on a mobile phone camera running down the street in the Istanbul suburb of Gungoren just seconds before the second blast hit, Yenisafak newspaper reported yesterday.
