ISTANBUL: The rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) said Thursday that it had torn up a unilateral truce in Turkey after a surge in deadly violence since the country’s weekend election.

Its announcement comes after several days of Turkish air raids against the PKK in both southeastern Turkey and across the border in northern Iraq and a spate of deadly clashes.

“The unilateral state of inaction has ended due to the AKP(Justice and Development Party) government’s latest attacks,” the PKK said in a statement carried by the pro-Kurdish news agency Firat.

“After the election, the AKP has demonstrated it is going to be a war government,” said the PKK, considered a terrorist organization by Ankara and its Western allies.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had vowed on Wednesday that Ankara would press ahead with its military campaign against the rebels in a conflict that has plagued Turkey for more than three decades.

“The operations against the terrorist organization inside and outside the country are continuing in a determined fashion,” Erdogan said on Wednesday.

“There will be no break. We will keep on,” he said in his first major policy speech since the AKP’s win, which was also a major personal victory for the man who has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade.

“We will keep on fighting until the terrorist organization buries their weapons under concrete and its members surrender and leave the country.”

Turkish war planes pounded PKK targets in the southeastern Kurdish-majority town of Yuksekova on Wednesday, the army said, the third straight day of airstrikes since the vote.

The military said 31 Kurdish militants were killed in the raids, but the figures could not be independently verified.

One Turkish policeman was also killed in clashes with PKK fighters on Thursday in Silvan, another southeastern town, where a curfew was declared this week, security sources told AFP. Another four militants were killed in clashes with Turkish security forces in the southeast this week.