ANKARA, Turkey (AP) Police on Monday clashed with a group of Kurds following a protest by some 5,000 people denouncing a dayslong curfew imposed by the government in one neighborhood in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir.
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The authorities plan to implement even stricter practices during curfews imposed in districts in Turkey’s southeast for military operations targeting the outlawedKurdistan Workers’ Party(PKK) daily Hürriyet has reported.
“I was born and raised in Diyarbakir and I’ve never seen anything like this”, said one father whose two children haven’t left their home in the city’s historic Sur neighborhood, the site of some of the most intense clashes, since their school was closed in early December because of the extended curfew.
Three Turkish police officers were killed Tuesday in a roadside bomb attack on their vehicle blamed on Kurdish rebels, security sources said, amid a new upsurge in violence in Turkey’s troubled southeast.
The Turkish security forces had killed 22 PKK militants in the ongoing anti-terror operations in the Cizre town and another in Silopi town of Sirnak province, the report quoted a Turkish security official as saying.
Speaking in Konya province on Thursday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the Turkish security forces’ fight against the terrorists would continue unabated.
A boy walks past burning tires during a protest against the curfew in Sur district, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said suspected Kurdish rebels…
In the latest escalation of a five-month campaign against the outlawed PKK, the security forces pursued rebels in the southeastern towns of Cizre and Silopi supported by helicopters and tanks.
The conflict had also complicated the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, with Turkey refusing to collaborate with the Kurdish fighters who have been battling the jihadists on the ground, the ICG said. More than 30 people died in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.
Figen Yukseldag, co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said 200,000 people have been displaced in recent months as a result of conflict in the south-east, accusing the state of conducting a war against Kurds.
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The PKK launched a formal insurgency against the Turkish state in 1984, initially fighting for Kurdish independence although it now presses more for greater autonomy and rights for the country’s largest ethnic minority.
