In latest Turkey violence, PKK kills three workers: Officials

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – The armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighting the Turkish army on Monday killed three civilian workers in the Kurdish province of Sirnak, said the Ankara-appointed governor’s office.

The PKK has not claimed the assault as there was no statement at the time of publishing this report by the group waging a decades-long guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state for larger Kurdish rights.

The deadly attack took place near Sirnak’s Uludere (Qilaban) district bordering the Kurdistan Region while the workers were doing road maintenance work in the mountainous area.

Turkish government forces launched a wide-scale operation in pursuit of the PKK fighters in the area, read a press release on the governorate’s website.

Ambulances took bodies of the slain civilians from the village of Roboski where the attack happened to a local hospital in Uludere, reported the state-funded Anadolu Agency.

Roboski was the scene of a massacre by Turkish warplanes in late December 2011 that bombed a group of 40 Kurdish smugglers, most of them from that village itself, killing 34, 17 of them teenagers.

The region remains highly militarized by the Turkish army and state-paid Kurdish irregulars due to its proximity to main PKK bases in the Kurdistan Region’s mountains south of the border.

A renewed phase of the war between the two sides since the mid-2015 collapse of a two year-held ceasefire has killed over 2,000 people, hundreds of those victims were civilians, according to a UN report released in March.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany