ARBIL (Iraq), Jan 15: Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq on Tuesday in the latest in a series of cross-border air strikes, Turkey’s military and northern Iraqi security forces said.

“Intensive” strikes targeted Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) positions in the regions of Zap-Sivi, Avasin-Basyan and Hakurk, the Turkish army general staff announced in a statement on its website.

“The aircraft returned safely to base after successfully completing their mission,” it said, adding that “maximum care” was taken to avoid civilian casualties. It gave no toll.

General Jabbar Yawar, spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga security forces of northern Iraq, said the air strikes had been preceded by an artillery barrage.

“The Turkish artillery bombarded the areas of Khakurg and Nirikan near Amadiyah,” some 450 kilometres north of Baghdad, Yawar said in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.

“Turkish military planes then took up the offensive and bombarded the same areas,” added Jawar, who said the attack had lasted nearly two hours.

Casualty figures were not immediately available from the areas hit in the strikes, which Yawar said were uninhabited.

A Kurdish Democratic Party official in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombardments had struck across a 15-kilometre strip along the border and five kilometres inside Iraq.

It was the fourth air strike against PKK targets in northern Iraq the Turkish military has confirmed since Dec 16, in addition to a cross-border ground operation to stop a group of militants seeking to infiltrate Turkey.

Iraqi Kurds, who run northern Iraq, reported two other air operations in December that Ankara did not confirm.

Turkey has massed up to 100,000 soldiers near the Iraqi border, and in October, the Turkish parliament gave a one-year authorisation for cross-border military action against the PKK.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday he could not predict when the offensive against Kurdish guerillas in Iraq would end.

“We hope that this fight against terrorism will end soon but we don’t know how much longer it will last,” Erdogan told journalists in Madrid, where he met Spanish counterpart Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

The air raids are conducted with intelligence made available by the United States.

At least 150 PKK militants have been killed and more than 200 rebel positions destroyed so far, including command and training bases, ammunition dumps and anti-aircraft posts, according to the army.

Ankara says an estimated 4,000 PKK militants take refuge in northern Iraq, where they are tolerated by the local Kurdish administration as they use camps there as a springboard for attacks inside Turkey.

Turkey, the United States and the European Union classify the PKK as a terrorist organisation.

The United States, at first reluctant to back Turkish military action in Iraq, has agreed to supply its Nato ally with intelligence on PKK movements for limited cross-border strikes.

The Pentagon said last month that a coordination centre was set up in Ankara where Turkish and US military officials share intelligence.

Washington is eager to fend off a large cross-border operation by the Turkish military that might destabilise the relatively peaceful northern part of Iraq.

The PKK has waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in southeast Turkey since 1984. The conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

A PKK rebel is suspected of being behind a car bomb in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Jan 3 that killed five teenagers and an adult and wounded 70 others.—AFP