Turkey ramps up attacks on Kurd rebels

CAIRO, Egypt – Turkey pressed an intensifying offensive against Kurdish guerrillas in neighboring Iraq on Wednesday, sending warplanes across the border to bomb suspected winter hideouts of the rebels, the Turkish military said.

The warplanes hit eight caves or other hideouts in the Zap valley, in northern Iraq, Turkey’s military general staff said in a statement on its Web site. Turkish armed forces had been watching the sites for some time and believed that rebels had been preparing the hideouts as winter bases, the statement said.

Turkey’s military called the bombing “a pinpoint operation.” It gave no casualty estimates, but Kurdish officials in the area said later that no one was killed.

The strike was the latest in a series of attacks Turkey has launched in northern Iraq since forging an agreement with the United States to share intelligence on the activity of the rebels, whom both the Turkish and U.S. governments have accused of terrorist activity.

Turkey claims to have killed or injured hundreds of the Kurdish guerrillas in ground and air raids into northern Iraq since mid-December.

Officials in northern Iraq, however, say the bombing raids have targeted largely deserted areas and caused few casualties. Kurdish officials in that area have condemned the raids and demanded that both the Iraqi and the U.S. governments move to stop the attacks.

Turkey says that thousands of fighters belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party are sheltering in predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq and using the area as a base for cross-border raids into Turkey.

The Kurdish guerrilla group, known by its Kurdish initials, PKK, took up arms in 1984 to fight for a separate homeland for Turkey’s Kurdish minority. The United States, the European Union and Turkey consider the PKK a terrorist organization.