ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey’s military hit Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq with artillery and airstrikes in a two-day operation that killed at least 15 rebels, the military said Saturday.
Turkish military shelled areas in northern Iraq on Thursday after it detected a group of Kurdish rebels preparing to attack Turkish targets from their bases in Iraq, the military said in a statement.
Turkish warplanes hit rebel targets in a cross-border campaign Friday, but casualty figures in that assault were unclear, the statement said.
“Some targets in the same area were hit by the air force’s warplanes,” it said. “The number of terrorists killed in this air attack could not be determined.”
A spokesman for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, denied rebels had been killed, calling it a “baseless claim.”
Turkey has carried out several cross-border operations against the PKK since the parliament authorized the government in October to send troops into Iraq to fight the rebels.
The Associated Press
