Fifteen Turkish soldiers and 23 Kurdish rebels were killed after an audacious rebel attack on a military post near the Iraqi border, which prompted a crushing military air and ground response, an army spokesman said yesterday.
Two other soldiers remained unaccounted for after Friday’s attack on the border station in Semdinli Town in Hakkari Province, General Metin Gurak, the head of the general staff’s press department told the Anatolia news agency.
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels launched the assault on the base — where a company of paramilitary soldiers were based — under cover of heavy weapons’ fire from bases in northern Iraq.
“Most of our losses were caused by heavy weapons’ fire from the north of Iraq,” Gurak said.
Turkish forces responded with artillery fire and attack helicopters pounded rebel positions while additional forces were dispatched to the area, he said.
Turkish fighter jets and artillery units also struck at a group of rebels in the north of Iraq, about 10km from the station under attack, Gurak said.
“Twenty-three terrorists were neutralized in the clashes. It is not yet clear how many terrorists were killed by artillery fire and in the strikes by the air force,” he said.
The fighting also left two soldiers with heavy injuries, he added.
Friday’s attack comes a day after the end of a three-day ceasefire the PKK announced for Id-al-Fitr, the Muslim festival marking the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.
The PKK — considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the EU — has been fighting for a separate state in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984.
Turkey claims that thousands of PKK militants are holed up in rear bases in the autonomous Kurdish north of Iraq from where they stage cross-border attacks on Turkish targets.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
ROYAL TARGET: After Prince Andrew lost much of his income due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he became vulnerable to foreign agents, an author said British lawmakers failed to act on advice to tighten security laws that could have prevented an alleged Chinese spy from targeting Britain’s Prince Andrew, a former attorney general has said. Dominic Grieve, a former lawmaker who chaired the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) until 2019, said ministers were advised five years ago to introduce laws to criminalize foreign agents, but failed to do so. Similar laws exist in the US and Australia. “We remain without an important weapon in our armory,” Grieve said. “We asked for [this law] in the context of the Russia inquiry report” — which accused the government
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
RSS