ISTANBUL,— Turkish warplanes struck 24 targets in a bombardment of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) positions in the southeastern Kurdish province of Hakkari in Turkish Kurdistan late on Tuesday, the military said.

The targets destroyed in border towns of Yuksekova and Daglica were mainly weapon emplacements and shelters, the army said in a statement on Wednesday.

Turkey has been bombarding PKK positions in the mountains of northern Iraq as well as the mainly Kurdish southeast following the collapse of a ceasefire in July in the most intense fighting between Kurdish militants and the state since the 1990s.

More than 120 security personnel and hundreds of militants have been killed since the ceasefire, initiated by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan more than two years ago, broke down.

Erdogan said on Tuesday more than 30 Kurdish militants had been killed in cross-border operations last Friday and added that the campaign would continue both inside and outside the country.

The PKK said in a statement last Sunday that its guerrilla fighters have killed 586 of Turkish soldiers and police officers in a month of clashes with the Turkish army, ANF news agency reported.

The military also said in its statement that two soldiers were killed on Tuesday when a bomb buried in the ground went off when a military vehicle passed by on a road between southeastern Kurdish towns of Semdinli and Yuksekova.

Three soldiers have been wounded during the incident.

Since it was established in 1984 the PKK has been fighting the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, with the aim of creating an independent Kurdish state.

In the 1990s, the PKK limited its demands to establish an autonomous Kurdish region and more cultural rights for ethnic Kurds,who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 75-million population but have long been denied basic political and cultural rights, its goal to political autonomy. A large Turkey’s Kurdish community openly sympathise with PKK rebels.

In March 2013, its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan called a ceasefire. But violence has resumed after a suicide bombing blamed on Islamic State killed 32 pro-Kurdish activists in July 2015 in the Kurdish town of Suruc in Turkish Kurdistan.

Since then, the PKK and Turkish forces are again trading attacks on the ground and from the air.

Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, Reuters | Ekurd.net

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