Kurdish rebels attack police, military in Turkey, one policeman killed

In another air operation in Bokriskan region of Iraq, the PKK’s “Sehit Dilan” battalion’s commander and four group leaders were killed, and 30 militants injured.

“They can not stay in this position”.

“A small proportion of those detained are IS members”, Demirtas said.

But the talk among the guerrillas was not of the war with Isis, but of an older foe further north: Turkey.

Although the Kurds represent around 25 percent of the population in post-World War I Turkey, because of the Turkish government policies, the Kurds in Turkey until 2006, officially were not known as Kurds but as “Mountain Turks”; and there was no government-run schools with Kurdish as the medium of instruction. Thus, Turkey’s attacking the PKK strongholds in northern Iraq is tantamount to helping the ISIS. The most effective resistance against ISIS has been carried out by Kurdish troops under the command of the PKK.

“These 13 people were killed while fighting Daesh“, the deceased’s father Fahrettin Oner said, using the Arabic name for the extremist militia organization.

But after initially targeting the IS group, the campaign has become increasingly focused on the PKK, with the Turkish air force bombing dozens of targets in an almost week-long campaign.

As Turkey vowed last month to strike the Islamic State, it simultaneously opened a new front in its conflict with Kurdish rebels.

The PKK announced it was stepping up attacks in mid-July over what it said were violations by Turkish forces of a 2013 ceasefire.

The PKK had been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.

He is also an Islamist, and repeatedly plays down the Isil threat, saying that the real enemies of peace are the Assad regime in Syria, and the PKK.

“In my view, the PKK and the Kurds is still more of an issue to Turkey than IS”, said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre.

But Turkey’s stepped up presence in to the global fight against the Islamic State has its own serious set of complications. “This would give it cover for its attacks against Kurdish fighters”.

The Turkish commandos came at dawn, surrounding this town on the Syrian border and hauling nine men off to jail. Turkey has vowed to crack down on its border security.

A lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, Faysal Sariyildiz, told reporters the casualties were civilians and that he had seen no sign of armed militants, contradicting official accounts.

The HDP with popular support among Kurdish and non-Kurdish populations in Turkey eroded Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) absolute majority in the Parliament in the Elections last June.

Kurdistan Staff Celebration (PKK) militants attacked a army outpost and a police automotive in southeast Turkey in a single day, killing a policeman, officers and safety sources stated on Sunday, in additional violence jeopardizing a fragile peace course of. Speaking in the south-eastern city of Van, he said the government must halt security operations and revive the peace process.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has previously said that strikes against the PKK would continue until the group surrenders.

Also on August 2, one Turkish soldier was killed and seven others wounded in a suspected PKK attack in the southeastern Mardin Province.