The attack happened early on Sunday near the town of Dogubayezit in Agri province, near the border with Iran.
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The attack came as Turkish jets pound targets of the PKK in northern Iraq in a broad “anti-terror” campaign which has also seen the outlawed group step up attacks inside Turkey.
Turkey is without a full time government even as it presses cross-border military operations against jihadists in Syria and Kurdish militants in northern Iraq.
According to an AFP toll, 17 members of the Turkish security forces have since been killed in attacks blamed on the PKK.
The airstrikes against the PKK, which is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU and U.S., were launched last week in conjunction with raids on Daesh militants in Syria.
The figure amounts to roughly the monthly salaries of Kurdistan’s entire security forces, who are in the forefront of the fight against Islamic State militants in the region, the Kurdish Regional Government’s (KRG) Energy ministry said in a statement.
But they have also urged restraint and a return to the peace process. On the one hand, it envisioned using them to create a geopolitical Israel’ in the heart of the Mideast, but on the other, it knew that such an effort would tempt Turkey to conventionally intervene and put an end to these plans (which could also derail its potential Eurasian pivot).
Demonstrators run away from tear gas used by riot police to disperse them during a march in solidarity with Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan in Diyarbakir, Turkey yesterday.
But so far the bombardments have focused far more on the Kurdish rebels – with Turkish official media claiming that 260 suspected PKK members have been killed – and the militants have retaliated inside Turkey.
Mr Bozan says that the war of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Isis and the PKK and the resulting civilian deaths is worse than the terrorism of Isis.
In addition to bombing the Kurds in northern Iraq, the YPG – a Syrian Kurdish militia aligned with the PKK – has accused Ankara of shelling a Kurdish-held village in northern Syria.
Turkey also cracked down on alleged terrorists within its orders in a massive string of arrests – with the majority of those arrested belonging to the PKK.
Anthony Cordesman, a CSIS military expert, said the deal with Turkey was likely good for overall U.S. strategy in the Middle East. But, he said: “One of the problems is we keep trying to describe this as if it were black and white, and what you’re really watching again is three-dimensional chess with something like 9 players and no rules”. CHP chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu said in a television interview late Sunday that whereas Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu “really wants” to form a coalition government Erdogan was blocking an alliance.
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“There are issues where we have serious differences and places where we overlap”, said Koc.
