Thirty-five people were killed on Turkey's
border with northern Iraq late Wednesday, in what Kurdish politicians say was a
Turkish air strike against civilian Kurds, mistaken for members of the outlawed
Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
Deputy Chairman of Turkey's
governing Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, Huseyin Celik, confirmed
late Thursday that the 35 dead were smugglers, all under 30 years of age, but
stopped short of calling them "civilians." If the dead are confirmed
to be civilians, Celik said, the incident was "an operational
accident."
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"Turkey's
struggle against terrorism continues, but we hope that this kind of a
unfortunate event will not happen again," Celik said, but added that it
wasn't yet clear why these people had been in the region and whether or not
they had connections with terrorists. "Legal and administrative
investigation to the event continues," he said. "According to the
information we have, these people were not terrorists but they were smuggling
... Turkey
is a state of law. If there is a mistake, this will be determined according the
understanding of the state of law."
The deaths are likely to further escalate tensions between Turkey
and its Kurdish minority, as the armed conflict between the PKK and the state
security forces, which started in 1984, continues.
Celik called for the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, to avoid
what he called provocation, after the BDP accused Turkish military of a
deliberate "massacre of civilians."
According to the BDP, the smugglers were killed when crossing from northern
Iraq to their home villages in Turkey's
southeastern province of Sirnak around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday night, carrying
diesel oil on a route always used by smugglers.
The local mayor of Uludere district in Sirnak, Fehmi Yaman, said 19 of the dead
were from one family, and all of them were from two villages, Ortasu and
Gulyazi, in Sirnak.
"They were smuggling diesel oil from Iraq as they had done for years ... Villagers
informed me about this around 1
a.m., when they reached the bodies. Some bodies were in
pieces and some burnt to black. The villagers wrapped bodies and body parts in
blankets," the mayor said.
Video footage by Turkey's
Dogan news agency showed people weeping around a line of some 20 or more
bodies, wrapped up in blankets, before carrying them in a pickup truck in the
border province of Sirnak.
Turkey's
General Staff Armed Forces, or TSK, confirmed Thursday that it had conducted an
air strike against a group of people late Wednesday evening on the Iraqi side
of the border. The statement said that the military had received intelligence
warning that terrorists were forming groups and preparing attacks against
Turkish military posts along the border region. The statement didn't directly
call the dead "terrorists," and stated that the event is being
investigated.
"The group was taken under fire between 9:37 and 10:24 p.m., after [they
were] determined to be in an area frequently used by terrorists, and upon
detecting movement toward our border at night time," the statement on the
TSK website said.
According to the military statement, captured PKK members have told
interrogators that terrorists also use mules to smuggle weapons and explosives,
to be used in operations against Turkish security forces --just as smugglers
carry their loads and containers. The statement said an unmanned military
aircraft had spotted the group approaching the border of Turkey
three hours before the attack.
"The official statement by the General Staff solely aims at covering up
this massacre," the BDP said in a written statement on Thursday, calling
for Turkey's
ruling AK Party to give account of the deaths.
The Kurdistan Communities Union, or KCK, an umbrella organization which the
government said acts as the urban wing of the PKK, accused the General Staff of
misinformation. The KCK said in a statement that the air strike took part on
the Turkish side of the border, not in Iraq, and over 18 miles away from the
place where the military statement said the incident happened.
"It is impossible for the TSK not to know that these people were not [PKK]
guerrillas," the KCK said. "This path is used by civilians for the
last seven to eight years, as is generally known by the soldiers. Everyone
[knows] that guerrillas do not travel with 40-50 mules in the middle of the
winter in that area."
During the hottest years of the armed conflict in 1994, 45 civilians, many of
them women and children, were killed in two villages of Sirnak, Kocagali and
Kuskonar, in a military air strike. "That investigation is still going
on," said the lawyer of the case in 1994, Tahir Elci, a human-rights
lawyer working in the city of Diyarbakir, in the predominantly Kurdish
southeast Turkey.
Turkish military has conducted sporadic land and air operations against PKK
bases in northern mountains of Iraq since 2007, but the Turkish military has
been unable to paralyze the organization, which conducts regular attacks in
southeast Turkey
against security forces.
"The military has been much more careful [with civilians] compared to the
1990's, but military solution to the conflict has been tried over and over
again, and it has not worked," said Hugh Pope, Turkey
and Cyprus project director at the International Crisis Group.
Pope said that the incident, if the dead were confirmed to be civilians, may
make it harder to convince Turkish Kurds that the government will improve the
status of the Kurdish minority, despite the initiated constitutional reform and
promised amendments to the antiterrorism law.
Turkey's
military resumed cross-border operations to northern Iraq in October, after the
PKK killed 24 Turkish soldiers in a series of raids on Turkish military posts
in Hakkari province by the border, in one of the deadliest PKK attacks in
almost three decades of armed conflict.
Earlier this month, the Turkish police detained scores in a wave of raids
focused on pro-Kurdish media organizations.
Turkey's
conflict with the PKK has claimed some 30,000-40,000 lives, according to
varying estimates. At the beginning, the organization campaigned for an
independent Kurdish state, but for the last years it has demanded Kurdish
autonomy and equal rights for Kurds in Turkey.
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union
and Turkey.