Turkey ends anti-Kurdish rebel operation in 1 town

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has announced that military operations against Kurdish rebels have ended in one mainly Kurdish southeastern town.

Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast is now engulfed in the worst violence since the 1990s after the collapse last July of a two-year-long ceasefire with PKK militants. “There will be a more orderly security presence”, the Yeni Safak daily quoted him as saying.

Turkey’s army says it has killed 320 militants in Cizre, 135 in Silopi and 101 in the Sur district of Diyarbakir city since operations began last month. According to Amnesty, moreover, “several deaths could have been caused by snipers in areas far from the clashes” and victims reportedly include “children, women and elderly people”.

“The operations now being conducted under round-the-clock curfews are putting the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk and are beginning to resemble collective punishment”, said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.

The military operations are particularly aimed at the PKK’s youth branch the Patriotic Revolutionist Youth Movement (YDG-H) which the government says has dug trenches and erected barricades in urban areas.

“I’m saying frankly: This mindset which gives a self-styled fatwa to the terror organization’s attacks on public servants, which simply says “it would be better if it didn’t do so” in response to the killing of civilians, disgusts me”, Erdogan said.

Separately, seven soldiers were wounded in a bomb attack by the PKK in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the southeast, security sources said.

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced a female teacher to nearly a year in prison for making a rude gesture at President Tayyip Erdogan at a political rally in 2014, local media reports said on Wednesday.

Amnesty accused Turkey’s Western partners of failing to speak out against the measures because of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member’s role fighting Daesh (the so-called IS) in neighboring Syria and hosting war refugees. The PKK, which launched its insurgency in 1984, is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.