DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, 10 December 2005 — Kurdish rebels attacked a military unit yesterday in southeastern Turkey, killing four soldiers and wounding two, in the latest act of mounting unrest in the mainly Kurdish region, officials said.
Two guerrillas from the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed in clashes that erupted after the attack on the army outpost near the town of Guclukonak, in Sirnak province, which borders Iraq and Syria.
Security officials said the soldiers, on guard duty outside the post, were attacked shortly after midnight with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles. A military operation with air cover is under way against the PKK in the area, they said.
Education Minister Huseyin Celik, who was visiting the region, confirmed the deaths of the four soldiers. He was speaking at the opening ceremony of a school in Sirnak’s Idil town as part of government efforts to boost education in a region plagued by chronic poverty and years of conflict between the army and the PKK.
“We came here to open a school... and we are very upset at such news,” Celik was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency. “We condemn terrorism.” Unrest in the southeast rose noticeably this year after the PKK, which is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, called off a five-year unilateral cease-fire in June 2004.
Officials in Sirnak said earlier this week that police seized about one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plastic explosives and detained two PKK militants and seven alleged accomplices in an operation that foiled planned bomb attacks in the town of Silopi, on the border with Iraq.
Some of the explosives and a detonator were found at the home of a Silopi town councilor identified by the media as the town’s Kurdish deputy mayor, Abdulaziz Coban.
Tensions in the southeast escalated last month with a wave of violent protests over allegations that members of the security forces were involved in a bomb attack on a bookstore owned by a former Kurdish guerrilla in a town in Hakkari province, which borders Sirnak.
The attack killed one person and the riots that followed claimed another five lives, rattling the Ankara government at a time when it is under pressure to demonstrate its respect for democracy and the rule of law.
The European Union has said the investigation into the bombing will be a test for the rule of law in Turkey. Ankara opened membership talks with Brussels on Oct. 4 with a view to joining the bloc in a decade.
Meanwhile, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is committed to cooperating with Turkey in its fight against PKK, FBI director Robert Mueller said in Ankara yesterday.
“We are working with our counterparts elsewhere in Europe and in Turkey to address the PKK and work cooperatively, to find and cut off financing to terrorist groups, be it PKK, Al-Qaeda” or others, Mueller told reporters.
“There have been concrete results and there will continue to be concrete results around the world, in Europe and elsewhere,” he added.
Mueller spoke after a day of talks with senior Turkish police and national intelligence officials, which he said served to strengthen bilateral ties and enable the two countries to cooperate in facing terrorist threats.
