Turkey disperses protest by Kurds denouncing curfew

On Tuesday, a roadside bomb ripped through an armored vehicle and killed three policemen in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir.

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey Turkish police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse a protest against a security crackdown in the main southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Monday, witnesses said, while curfews were declared elsewhere in the region. In Suruc, Sanliurfa province, a further two PKK terrorists handed themselves over to security forces.

The attack came a day after two people were killed and as many wounded in clashes in Diyarbakir province on Monday, as police cracked down on a march to protest an ongoing curfew, local media reports said.

The two demonstrators, aged 21 and 25, were shot dead in violent clashes that erupted over the curfew that has been in place in the city’s central Sur district nearly uninterrupted since December 2, a security source told AFP, asking not to be named.

Turkey will take the fight to Kurdish militants in the southeast to prevent them from “spreading the fire” from neighbouring Syria and Iraq into the country, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Tuesday, as violence flared up again.

Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast has been beset by unrest in recent months as security forces battle Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants after a ceasefire collapsed in July. Several thousand teachers are based in the towns.

Meanwhile, Turkish security forces discovered a massive cave in the eastern region of Igdir it said was used by the PKK militants and stuffed with hundreds of kilogrammes of vegetables and other food staples such as rice and pasta, the army said in a separate statement. Since then, Ankara has imposed round-the-clock curfews in many areas.

Armoured vehicles sped around and protesters threw stones at police. “The prime minister has spoken quite decisively, saying “all districts will be cleansed of terrorist elements, from street-to-street, house-to-house if necessary”.

According to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, a total of 52 curfews have been imposed since mid-August in 17 districts in southeastern and eastern Turkey, affecting some 13 million people. It is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and European Union.