17 Turkish Troops Die in Kurds’ Biggest Raid

A 400-strong battalion of Kurdish rebels killed 17 Turkish soldiers on the Iraqi border, Information Minister Imren Aykut said Friday--the biggest and bloodiest attack against a Turkish military target reported in the 7-year-old Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey.

The attack late Thursday triggered reprisal raids by Turkish F-104 warplanes and helicopters bearing troops into northern Iraq to strike the mountaintop bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

“The brigands suffered many casualties,” Aykut said in a television address after which the Turkish general staff vowed that its operations would “totally destroy the enemy.” The PKK must have anticipated such a reaction in a raid planned to follow last Sunday’s parliamentary election in Turkey, which was narrowly won by conservative Suleyman Demirel.

The guerrillas killed the 17 soldiers in attacks on three guard posts in the southeastern Cukurca region, Aykut said.

“The war continues. We have no choice. They are preparing a massacre,” Mehmet Sait, a spokesman for the PKK, said in a telephone interview from Germany. “It is up to the Turkish government to declare a cease-fire.”

The Turkish army chief of staff, Gen. Dogan Gures, said the third major Turkish cross-border operations in three months were shallow attacks over the border from which his troops would soon withdraw.

The latest raids were in response to a sudden rash of attacks on Turkish targets in the Kurdish southeast by the rebel guerrillas, fighting for an independent state for Turkey’s 12 million Kurds.

Earlier, the guerrillas killed five Turkish soldiers in a raid near Sirnak--the latest addition to a rapidly growing death toll of about 3,300 people since 1984.

In a scene reminiscent of the Wild West, a band of 20 guerrillas also piled logs on a railway line and held up the trans-Turkey express, harangued the occupants and shot up the carriages, killing one passenger.

Earlier Turkish reprisal raids into northern Iraq have been controversial. At least 11 Iraqi Kurdish civilians died in early August and another three on Oct. 11, when witnesses say Turkish warplanes dropped napalm bombs and strafed Iraqi villages that Turkey believed may have helped the rebels.

Germany protested the raids, but Turkey’s other North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies kept silent.

Under pressure from Turkey, the eight-party Iraqi Kurdistan Front agreed to try to prevent attacks on Turkish borders two weeks ago, said Hoshyar Zibari, a spokesman for the chief group in the front, the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

“The only way is to repopulate the border. But these Turkish attacks are preventing that,” Zibari said.

Moderates fear that the latest PKK attacks will escalate the cycle of violence in the southeast, losing a chance for compromise if Demirel can put aside traditional fears of Kurdish ambitions and embrace a parliamentary group of 22 Kurdish nationalists as part of his expected coalition with the Social Democrats.