Turkish Warplanes Strike Kurdish Bases in Iraq in Response to Killing of Soldiers

Stung into action by rising casualties in a growing Kurdish insurgency, Turkey sent its warplanes Friday to pound rebel bases across the border in northern Iraq.

Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz said eight waves of eight planes struck four miles into Iraq in retaliation for the killing of 11 Turkish soldiers at a border post on Monday.

The action was part of a cycle of violence with Kurds inside Turkey’s own borders, unconnected with recent fighting between Iraqi Kurds and the Iraqi army that caused hundreds of casualties around the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah.

Targets hit by the Turkish bombs in Iraq were pre-selected mountain camps of the rebel Kurdish Workers Party, known by its acronym PKK, said Ferhat Ataman, a Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman.

U.S. reconnaissance operations over northern Iraq were not affected by the Turkish raid, said Army Maj. Michael McKinney, a spokesman for the big Incirlik base from which U.S. warplanes patrol the region hit by the Turks.

Major troop movements have been reported on the Turkish side of the border. But Turkish officials have made no mention of any land incursion on the scale of their last two-week operation into Iraq in early August.

Ankara said 35 PKK guerrillas were killed in that raid and large arms dumps were found in the harsh mountain camps where hardened rebels often sleep under the trees or in caves, moving every few days.

But Masoud Barzani, leader of the Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, said in a recent interview that the victims were Iraqi Kurdish refugee women and children. Party officials put the number of dead at 15.

“Turkish intelligence had got everything mixed up. What they did was against us. They have to be more precise,” Barzani said.

Iraqi Kurdish sources said Tuesday’s cease-fire around Sulaymaniyah held through Thursday. The fighting had ended with a small territorial advance for the Kurds, and the overall situation was tense, they said.

Turkey is very concerned about violence that has escalated into a daily routine in the southeast, where the population is almost exclusively ethnic Kurds who make up about one in five of Turkey’s 57 million people.

Between 50 and 100 people die monthly, adding to a total of more than 3,300 people killed since 1984 when rebels launched their single-minded campaign in Turkey for a united, independent state for the 25 million Kurds of the Middle East. They now are split among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Soviet Trans-Caucasia.

Trains and roads are now often attacked by the Kurdish rebels, virtually halting travel between cities at night. Embassies have warned against any travel in the area after three groups of foreigners were abducted and a number of Turkish officials killed. The rebels even struck close to the Soviet border this week, shooting to death a young Turkish lieutenant in front of his wife and 6-month-old baby.

Such a breakdown in law and order--including the machine-gun assassination of three Turkish political police officers in Istanbul on Thursday--has put Yilmaz, the prime minister, under pressure to act before Turkey’s Oct. 20 parliamentary elections. President Turgut Ozal has in the past warned that Turkish units might strike at the main base of the PKK in Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley.