PKK kills one, injures four Turkish soldiers in southeast Turkey

Warplanes pounded 17 targets in the province of Hakkari on Monday and Tuesday, the military said, part of a renewed crackdown on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy.

Seventeen targets were the subject of attacks by Turkish military planes, located in the Hakkari province on the country’s border with Iran and Iraq.

In further violence yesterday, Kurdish rebels attacked an infantry brigade command post in Sirnak province, also in south-eastern Turkey, seriously wounding a soldier who later died in a hospital.

With only 10 minutes notice to their American partners, Turkey launched a massive air strike of its own July 24 against a Kurdish militant group in the northern mountains of Iraq.

Another soldier was killed in a rocket attack allegedly carried out by PKK militants on a military helicopter in Beytussebap district.

Violence has spiralled, with at least 26 members of the security forces killed since July 20.

The statement came after Feridun H. Sinirlioglu, an undersecretary in the Turkish foreign ministry, said earlier Tuesday that the US and Turkey had reached an agreement to create a buffer zone along the Turkey-Syria border under the supervision of US-led coalition air forces.

The spike in attacks is unfolding as the United States and Turkey are working on a new plan to battle Islamic State group fighters in Syria, which shares a more than 500-mile-long border with Turkey. The PKK claimed responsibility for the auto bombing of an Istanbul police station on the same day.

Authorities have also arrested more than 1,300 suspects since last month in police raids nationwide targeting suspected PKK and IS members as well as the DHKP-C.

The DHKP-C, known until the mid-1990s as Devrimci Sol (Revolutionary Left), is a deeply secretive group which goes quiet for periods before re-emerging to stage attacks.

The recent PKK attacks appeared to rattle a delicate cease-fire that brought relative calm to Turkey over the last two years after the Turkish government launched the “solution process” in 2013 when Erdogan was prime minister.

“Everybody is focused on the ISIL threat inside Syria, and Turkey has said themselves that that’s where the locus of their energy is going to be applied”.

Erdogan said that the over-two-week air campaign against the PKK had already inflicted “serious losses” on the group.

Davutoglu’s Islamic-rooted ruling party lost its parliamentary majority in elections in June, forcing it to seek a coalition partner.

The PKK has been fighting Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has left 40,000 people dead.