Clashes in southeast Turkey kill seven, new curfews declared

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said security forces would crack down on the PKK militants to frustrate efforts to “spread the fire” from neighbouring Iraq and Syria to Turkey.

On Wednesday, the Turkish military said eight Kurdish militants had been killed in fighting in the southeast as security forces enforced curfews in several cities across the region, including parts of Diyarbakir, the de facto Kurdish capital.

The government has responded by cracking down with operations in border towns such as Cizre and Silopi.

Operations against the terrorist organization PKK were ongoing in the province on Tuesday evening.

On Monday, two protesters died in a clash between police and Kurdish demonstrators over a curfew imposed in Diyarbakir.

Claims an 11-year-old boy was also killed have not been verified. “Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, house by house, street by street”, he said.

Davutoglu said the army had established control along the mountainous Iraqi border after “cleansing the mountains of terrorists”, and that the PKK had since focused on turning people against the state in urban areas.

The army said in a statement that six members of the security forces had received non-life threatening wounds in Cizre while two had also been hurt in Silopi.

Witnesses said the towns’ streets were empty and stores closed on Thursday and the Sirnak governor’s office said security forces continued to dismantle barricades, fill ditches and remove explosive devices planted by the PKK.

Ferhat Encu, a lawmaker from pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), shared on Twitter a video showing the MP arguing with soldiers as they went house-to-house. Encü said the curfews had “begun destroying the towns”, forcing people to flee.

The Turkish government has been waging a relentless offensive aimed at crippling the rebel PKK, which has staged a string of attacks against security forces in Turkey since a two-year-old ceasefire fell apart in late July.

The PKK launched its insurgency in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since. Since then more than 180 members of the security forces have been martyred and around 1,700 PKK terrorists killed.

“Turkey faces a critical choice: to advance its military strategy against the PKK in a fight that is bound to be protracted and inconclusive, or to resume peace talks”, the non-governmental think tank said.