ANKARA, TURKEY // Turkish jets bombed targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in south-east Turkey, officials said on Tuesday, the first strikes on the outlawed group since a 2013 ceasefire amid growing concern about the peace process.
Turkish F-16 jets dropped bombs late on Monday on PKK targets in the village of Daglica in the Kurdish-majority Hakkari province near the border with Iraq, a security source said on condition of anonymity.
In a separate incident also Monday, Turkish attack helicopters struck at PKK targets around the village of Geyiksuyu in the Tunceli province of eastern Turkey following raids by the PKK.
The fierce clashes between ISIL insurgents and Kurdish forces in the key Syrian town of Kobani have shaken Turkey’s fragile peace process with the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and much of the international community.
Frustrated with Turkey’s lack of action to stop the ISIL advance in northern Syria on fellow Kurds, Turkey’s Kurdish community has taken to the streets in several cities in the south-east over the past week, with scores killed in deadly clashes.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the unrest on the “dark forces” seeking to sabotage the delicate peace process with the PKK to end 30 years of violence that has claimed at least 40,000 lives.
The airstrikes came one day before the October 15 deadline given by the PKK’s overall leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in an island prison on the sea of Marmara, for a roadmap to salvage the flagging peace process.
But Nihat Ali Ozcan, security analyst at the Ankara-based Tepav think tank, said while the peace process could well be “dead in the water” one day, it would not be over just because of these latest incidents.
“It is not an easy task to manage the peace process,” he said.
* Agence France-Press
