Deadly clashes and gunfire in Turkish border town

At least five people were killed on Friday in clashes between Turkish security forces and PKK supporters in the southeastern town of Silopi.

Television footage of the unrest in the Kurdish-majority town in Sirnak province close to Turkey's southern border with Iraq showed smoke rising from burning buildings and burnt-out cars as gunfire rang out.

The provincial governor’s office said that five people, including one policeman, had been killed and several others wounded in an operation to seal ditches dug by youth members of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) to prevent police entering the area.

Three of those killed, among them a teenager, had died in a gun battle, the governor's office said. 

Earlier, Silopi mayor Seyfettin Aydemir told the AFP news agency that a 17-year-old had died in hospital of gunshot wounds. The identities of those killed remained unclear.

"Snipers are positioned on the rooftops. It's not safe here," Aydemir said.

Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said that security forces had come under fire from suspected PKK supporters after moving into Silopi's Baris neighborhood early on Friday morning, with the clashes continuing for four hours.

The governor's office said those fighting security forces had set up barricades equipped with mines and improvised explosives.

Faysal Sariyildiz, a member of parliament for the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), tweeted that a vehicle carrying wounded civilians had been shot at by police as it took them to hospital.

Translation: We are at Silopi government hospital. The police have shot a vehicle carrying the injured. Bullets are on the vehicle’s tyres.

Sariyildiz also said that six houses had been set on fire and many people injured.

Also on Friday, a Turkish soldier and an Iranian bus company employee were killed in a PKK attack in the eastern Agri province, security sources told AFP.

Raids in Ankara

Security forces also carried out early-morning raids in Ankara at locations police said were linked to the PKK.

Police raided five locations simultaneously targeting the “urban organisation of the PKK,” Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

The raids followed an operation in Istanbul on Thursday targeting suspected supporters of the PKK, the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) and the Islamic State (IS) group after police defused a bomb in the city late on Wednesday.

Police said they had raided 13 houses in the Inkilap neighbourhood and seized a number of organisational documents.

In the Eyup district they also raided a house suspected of being used by arms smugglers, Anadolu said.

Turkish security forces have arrested more than 1,300 suspects since launching a crackdown last month against both Kurdish separatists and IS supporters following a suicide bombing blamed on IS in the southeastern town of Suruc that killed 32 people, and the killings of two police officers by the PKK two days later.

But attacks against Turkish security forces have continued. On Monday two soldiers were injured in the majority Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in a land-mine blast targeting an armoured car.

On Sunday a suicide bombing at a military headquarters in eastern Turkey killed two soldiers, while a third was killed in a land mine attack on a military convoy.

'Civilians killed in airstrikes'

Turkey has also launched airstrikes against PKK and IS positions in Iraq and Syria, with Anadolu reporting on Saturday that at least 260 PKK fighters had been killed in the first week of the bombing campaign.

But it faces allegations of also killing civilians in villages in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

Mohammad Hassan, a local official in the village of Zargali in northern Iraq, told Irin News that eight civilians were killed and 16 more wounded in an airstrike targeting the village on 1 August. No fighters had died in the attack, he added.

The PKK controls access to the valley where Zargali is located, but a spokesperson for the group told Irin News that its fighters were based in the mountains and did not use villages as bases.

“Everybody knows this is a village. We are not fighting Turkey here. People here are living their lives. They are not the ones to pay for the fighting,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement, Turkish officials described Zargali as a “terrorist training camp” and said that high-level PKK members were in the village at the time of the strike.