Ten Turkish soldiers killed in Kurdish rebel attacks

Army chief urges Iraqi Kurds to expel the PKK from their territory

Turkish soldiers patrol a road near the town of Lice, southeastern Turkey, yesterday. Nine soldiers were killed in southeast Turkey in the worst attack in months and police detained two suspected suicide bombers in the capital in an escalation of tensions.

DIYARBAKIR (AFP) - Kurdish rebels waging a separatist campaign killed 10 soldiers in two separate attacks in Turkey's southeast yesterday, ending months of calm in the conflict-stricken area, the army chief and military sources said.

Nine of the soldiers were killed in a powerful bomb blast blamed on the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Diyarbakir province, the chief of general staff, General Ilker Basbug, told reporters.

The bomb - possibly a homemade device - exploded as an armored personnel carrier was passing on a road near the small village of Abali in Diyarbakir, General Basbug told a news conference in Ankara.

The vehicle, accompanied by a tank, was carrying a team of soldiers responsible for scouring the road for possible explosives ahead of the scheduled passage of a military convoy later in the day.

«The tank passed over the same spot, but the explosives went off when the armored personnel carrier was passing,» Basbug said.

The general said an investigation was under way into the type of explosives used, but he underlined that it was «probably a homemade device operated with a remote-control or a cable system.» «The carrier's underside has armor that is 4 to 4.5 centimeters thick. It must have been a very powerful device to have such an effect on the vehicle,» Basbug added.

The PKK frequently uses land mines or homemade roadside bombs to attack security forces.

In the second attack, a soldier was shot dead after his team came under fire from PKK rebels while returning to base from an operation on rural ground near the town of Semdinli, close to the border with Iraq, a military source said.

An operation was under way to catch the attackers, he added.

Yesterday's attacks were the bloodiest by the PKK in recent months following a lull in fighting amid heavy bombing raids by Turkish warplanes on the group's rear bases in northern Iraq.

«These incidents never lessen the determination and will of the security forces in their struggle against terrorism,» Basbug said.

«Let us not forget that there is no room for pessimism in the struggle against terrorism. If you give into pessimism, you will lose.»

Basbug urged the autonomous Kurdish administration of northern Iraq once again to expel the PKK from their territory, saying: «They must participate more actively» in efforts to curb the rebels.

He also called on the Ankara government to amend a penal code article that allows for outright pardons and reduced sentences for repentant militants in order to make it even more appealing.

«The article is a good one, but it must be made more attractive,» Basbug said, calling on the government to also take social measures, such as establishing special centers to rehabilitate repentant militants.

Basbug said 1,238 PKK rebels had surrendered themselves to security forces and benefited from the penal code article in recent years, adding that 675 of these had been released without any charges.

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey's Army chief of staff, General Ilker Basbug, yesterday brushed aside Israel's criticism of his country's first-ever joint military exercises with neighboring Syria.

«Israel's reaction does not interest us. We do not have to explain to a third country any military exercise that we undertake with another country,» General Basbug told a news conference here.

«The exercises only concern Turkey and Syria,» he added, describing the three-day maneuvers as a «small-scale» affair between teams of border troops. On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak called the exercises as a «worrying» development.

«The military maneuvers are a worrying development, but the strategic ties uniting Israel and Turkey will prevail,» Barak said.