Jailed PKK leader to meet with family for Islamic holiday

Ocalan’s family will be allowed to see him at his high security jail on the prison island of Imrali off Istanbul over the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha beginning next week, the state-run Anadolu Newsagency said.

“The PKK has suffered a distinct failure in these bloody attacks, which it has conducted at the cost of its most serious losses in its history”, he said.

The mayors have been replaced by Ankara-appointed deputy and district governors, who took up their new posts Sunday morning.

President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that the campaign against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, was Turkey’s largest ever and that the removal of civil servants linked to them was a key part of the fight. The target of the purge is mainly supporters of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of masterminding the putsch. Four of the removed mayors are accused of ties to Gulen with 24 said to support the PKK.

The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party, or HDP, condemned the appointments as a “coup by trustees” that violates the Turkish constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights.

On Friday, police detained dozens of people and used water cannon to disperse several hundred teachers demonstrating against their suspension in the largely Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir. In a televised message, Erdogan said Turkey had a “duty to defeat the ISIL terror group in Syria and render it unable to carry out activities in Turkey”.

He said the Feto group was behind the July 15 attempted coup and the PKK/Democratic Union Party in Syria would be stopped like the PKK in Turkey.

“This unlawful and arbitrary action will only deepen the existing problems in Kurdish towns and cause the Kurdish issue to be even more unsolvable”, it said.

Turkey and its Syrian extremist allies invaded northern Syria more than two weeks ago, ostensibly in retaliation for the latest Isis atrocity – although the militants have offered far less resistance to Ankara’s forces than to the Syrian army or the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.

The Turkish military said on Wednesday that 186 PKK members had been killed in the operations conducted in the southeastern district of Cukurca over the past few days.