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By AYLA ALBAYRAK
ISTANBUL—At least 35 people were killed on Turkey's border with northern Iraq late Wednesday, in what Kurdish politicians say was a Turkish air strike against civilians, possibly mistaken for members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
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Residents stand near of the bodies of people who were killed in an air strike in the village of Uludere, southeast Turkey.
.According to lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, bombs dropped by Turkish warplanes killed more than 35 Kurdish villagers crossing from northern Iraq to their home villages in Turkey's southeastern province of Sirnak around 9.30pm Wednesday night. There were varying estimates of the total death toll from Kurdish politicians, but BDP official Altan Tan said 36 had been killed, while one local mayor said 19 of the dead were from one family.
Fehmi Yaman, the Kurdish mayor in the Uludere district of Sirnak, said 35 civilians from the villages of Ortasu and Gulyazi had been confirmed dead and identified by noon Thursday.
"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 twenty 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 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 in interrogators that terrorists smuggle weapons and explosives, to be used in operations against Turkish security forces, on the backs of animals—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 Governorate of Sirnak province initially said 20 people had died at the border region but later confirmed in a statement that 35 had been killed and one wounded as a result of an air operation late Wednesday at the border of Iraq, close to the district of Uludere, according to state-run Anadolu news agency. "Legal and administrative investigation and procedures to the event have started," the statement said. The deaths are likely to further escalate tensions between Turkey and its Kurdish minority, fueling fears that the conflict that has simmered since 1984 could reignite.
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 said that the air strike took part on the Turkish side of the border 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."
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, Mr. Tahir Elci, a human-rights lawyer working in the city of Diyarbakir.
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. Sporadic land and air operations against PKK bases in northern mountains of Iraq have taken place since 2007, but the Turkish military has been unable to paralyze the organization, which conducts regular attacks in the Southeast Turkey against security forces.
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.
