Hundreds of demonstrators, including teachers who were suspended, took to the streets in the mainly-Kurdish city of Diyarbakir to protest the government move.
Advertisement
Turkish officials also suspended 1,151 teachers in the Kurdish eastern provinces of Tunceli and Van. Several hundred teachers gathered in front of the education ministry’s provincial building Tunceli to protest, Reuters TV footage showed.
“It is not possible to accept this decision”.
Turkey has been carrying out anti-terror operations in the country’s east and southeast, in response to PKK terrorist attacks which target police, military, as well as civilians.
“We have run and are now running the largest operations against the P.K.K. terrorist organization in its history, both within and across our borders”, Mr. Erdogan said on Thursday. Mr. Gulen has repeatedly denied involvement.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
The operations are part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls his latest offensive to weed out PKK militants.
Turkey will remove municipal managers who support the PKK and appoint new administrators to more than two dozen municipalities, the country’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said in a broadcast interview with a local news outlet.
Soylu said 28 municipalities would no longer be run “under the orders of Qandil” a reference to northern Iraq’s Qandil mountain where the PKK’s leadership is based.
Demonstrations have been banned across Diyarbakir province since mid-August during the state of emergency declared after the failed coup.
Advertisement
The Turkish military has waged a relentless offensive against the PKK in the southeast and in northern Iraq, after the rupture of a ceasefire a year ago. Since then, more than 600 security personnel have been killed and more than 7,000 PKK terrorists killed. Turkey and its allies have labelled the PKK a terror organization.
