50 Die as Turkey Battles Leftist Group, Kurds; U.S. Consulate Target of Rocket : Political unrest: Police raid safe houses of Marxist rebels aiming to overthrow the state through terrorism.

Two days of violence in Turkey killed more than 50 people, damaged the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul and dealt grave blows to the country’s two fiercest armed opposition groups, Turkish officials said Friday.

Most of the fighting was in Istanbul, where a rocket was fired at the palatial U.S. Consulate building late Thursday; the Marxist terrorist group Dev-Sol claimed responsibility.

The ruthlessly efficient group has assassinated dozens of high-ranking Turkish police officers and several army generals, and in recent weeks has staged almost daily hit-and-run attacks on police patrol cars and official vehicles.

But if the group was feeling a sense of triumph, it was cut short early Friday morning. Acting on a tip and a confession, police raided six of the group’s safe houses in Istanbul.

Whole districts of this city of 5.5 million people resounded to the sound of heavy machine-gun fire for up to eight hours as police pressed home their attacks against apartments fortified by steel doors.

By daylight, police said that 11 Dev-Sol militants had been killed, including six women, and that seven more were held, including a 6-year-old girl who had been in a house where one couple was killed.

“We did not fire first and called on them to surrender,” Istanbul Governor Hayri Kozakcioglu told reporters as he showed off captured pistols, machine guns and stacks of money from robberies regularly staged by the group.

“They bought one house for 900 million lira ($140,000) in a luxury district,” he said. “Their ideology is bankrupt. They were only stealing to live well.”

In one shootout, militants hung their group’s flag from a window before police shot through an armored door to discover dozens of weapons.

Television showed local people hanging the Turkish flag from their balconies and clapping as police armored cars left the scene, part of a pro-government reaction after a month of unremitting violence. Tips to police are now made frequently on a newly opened special police telephone line.

Kozakcioglu said that Dev-Sol has suffered a serious blow, but he admitted that he could not yet say that the group’s back was broken. In fact, the group’s commitment and sophistication were illustrated by the capture of fax machines, mobile telephones and disguise materials including wigs and hair dye.

Dev-Sol--the Revolutionary Left--is a holdover from Turkey’s politically violent 1970s. Despite its marginal public support, it hopes by terrorist killings to destabilize and overthrow the Turkish state.

Dev-Sol’s urban terrorists are loosely allied to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a more broadly based group fighting for self-determination for ethnic Kurds in the southeast of the country, home to about half of Turkey’s 12 million Kurds.

Fighting in the southeast has killed about 40 people since Wednesday, including 30 PKK guerrillas killed during an army raid to free a captured Turkish noncommissioned officer. He was found dead with torture marks on his body, the government said.

Television showed a field where dozens of Kurdish guerrillas’ bodies were lined up beside a Kurdish flag and a small arsenal of weapons.

Ankara says both Dev-Sol and the Kurdish guerrillas are backed by Syria. Turkish Interior Minister Ismet Sezgin, on a visit to Damascus this week, sternly warned of Turkish anger over the presence of both Dev-Sol and Kurdish guerrillas at a training area in Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley.

Sezgin said Syrian President Hafez Assad has promised to cooperate in dealing with the problem. Turkish Foreign Ministry sources said it is too early to say if Syria intends to close the camps.

Turkish newspapers have highlighted speculation about a Turkish air raid on the Bekaa Valley if the camps remain open, but foreign and Turkish diplomats say that all diplomatic avenues will be exhausted first.

“If Syria gives support for six months, we can finish this business. In fact, I can say it is already solved,” Sezgin told the Turkish newspaper Milliyet.

Turkey admits to the existence of 10,000 PKK guerrillas. Reports from northern Iraq, however, say that hundreds of well-armed and well-fed rebels are moving over the border into Turkey while their leaders promise that the real fighting in a long-promised “hot summer” has not yet begun.

Commenting on the rocket attack on the consulate in Istanbul, U.S. spokeswoman Harriet Elam said: “Thanks to the presence of a tree, nobody was hurt. But the shrapnel left some pockmarks on the wall. It is disconcerting.”

American diplomats are already under heavy guard because of threats from Dev-Sol, which has killed two Americans linked to the U.S. military in the past two years and bombed several American banks and businesses.