Military vehicles and even trains have been targeted by the group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
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The BBC report, which aired Wednesday during its “Newsnight” program, included interviews with, and profiles of, several Kurdish and Yazidi women at a PKK training camp in northern Iraq.
Protests are increasing as government ministers attend funerals of Turkish soldiers who were killed by the Kurdish rebel group PKK.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry criticized UK media outlet’s display of Kurdistan Worker’s Pary (PKK) as “written and visual propaganda of the terrorist organization”. “They are more symbolic than crippling”, he told AFP.
Dozens of people, majority police and soldiers, have died in the violence since July. It killed at least eight Turkish soldiers and wounded one other while they were on highway security duty, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement.
The Turkish foreign ministry called on the BBC to “adopt the same editorial guidelines” as it did towards the Irish Republican Army (IRA) when it carried out attacks against police in Northern Ireland.
“However, the PKK has lots of experience dispersing and hiding from the Turkish military”. The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead.
But so far the campaign against IS is very much on ice – for coordination purposes, according to U.S. and Turkish officials – while the strikes against the PKK have been relentless.
In the past two weeks, three civilians and five members of special security forces have been killed in Silopi, a reflection of the escalating cycle of violence in towns and cities across the southeast.
Turkey is meanwhile still without a permanent government after inconclusive June 7 elections and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country was now “swiftly” heading to snap polls.
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Of course, there is also the ideological factor, in that the Islamist AK Party identifies with Islamist rebel groups fighting against the Syrian regime.
