Turkey strikes targets in Iraq

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.

Areas in northern Iraq were shelled Thursday after the military detected a group of Kurdish rebels preparing to attack Turkish targets from their bases in Iraq, the military said in a statement. It said 15 rebels were killed in the shelling.

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 rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, denied that any of its fighters had been killed, saying it was a “baseless claim.”

“Turkish jet fighters launched airstrikes against sites at the Zab border area [for three hours] with no casualties reported,” spokesman Haval Danas said. “The fighter jets have bombed old sites that witnessed fierce clashes before with the Turkish army and nobody was there.”

Turkey, like the European Union and the United States, considers the PKK a terrorist organization.

The Turkish statement confirmed the first cross-border action by the military since an eight-day ground incursion in late February. It said it hit only confirmed rebel targets and did not harm civilians.

The PKK took up arms against the government in 1984, and tens of thousands of people have died in the fighting.