Turkey, Iran bombard Kurdish rebels in Iraq: PKK

[David]

AP


QANDIL, Iraq (AFP) – Turkish warplanes and Iranian artillery bombarded Kurdish rebel hideouts in northern Iraq on Monday, a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) spokesman said.

"Turkish planes and Iranian artillery bombarded Aquwan and the Iranians bombarded Maradu. The bombardment lasted for about one hour starting from 7pm (1600 GMT)," the spokesman, Ahmed Denis, told AFP.

The spokesman had no immediate word on any casualties.

The fresh bombardment of the remote mountains where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet follows talks in Ankara on December 24 between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Iraqi counterpart Nuri al-Maliki.

In those talks, the two governments agreed to step up cooperation against PKK rebels operating rear-bases in northern Iraq.

Denis criticised the Iraqi position, accusing it of compromising its sovereignty.

"How could they allow a neighbouring country to bombard their own land and people?" he asked.

Hours after Maliki's visit to Ankara, three Turkish soldiers were killed and nine wounded when PKK rebels armed with automatic weapons attacked an army vehicle in the border town of Cizre.

Turkish warplanes then bombed rebel hideouts in Khwakurk and Khnera on December 28.

On the eve of Maliki's visit, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who is himself a Kurd, pledged that both the central government in Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Iraq were determined to stop the PKK using rear-bases in the region.

Blacklisted as a terror group by the European Union and the United States, the PKK took up arms for self-rule in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast in 1984, triggering a conflict that has claimed some 44,000 lives.

Iran too has accused the Iraqi Kurds of harbouring rear-bases for rebels operating inside its territory.

Iranian officials charge that many of the fighters of the the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK) are in fact Turkish Kurds, not members of its own Kurdish minority.