SIRNAK, Turkey’s Kurdish region,— Turkish military helicopter crashed Wednesday near Turkey’s border with Iraqi Kurdistan, killing all 13 personnel on board, the military said.

The crash occurred in the border province of Sirnak, where Turkish troops are engaged in operations against Kurdish militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK.

But a military statement said the crash appeared to be accidental, with initial information indicating that the AS 532 Cougar had hit a high-voltage transmission line shortly after taking off from a base in Sirnak’s Senoba region.

The military didn’t provide information on the victims. The private DHA news agency, however, said the helicopter was carrying a delegation, headed by a major-general, which was inspecting the Senoba region. Other media reports said there were six other officers on board.

The helicopter crashed at 8:55 p.m., the military said, adding that an investigation was underway.

Defense Minister Fikri Isik and other government ministers immediately left the capital, Ankara, for Sirnak, DHA reported.

In April 2017, a Turkish police helicopter with 12 people on board has crashed in the Kurdish region in eastern Turkey.

According to PKK’s balance sheet of war published in January 2017, one F-16 and 3 helicopters have been destroyed by the Kurdish rebels in 2016.

Three Turkish soldiers were killed on Wednesday in clashes with Kurdish militants in the southeastern Kurdish province of Diyarbakir in Turkish Kurdistan, security sources said.

Since July 2015, Turkey initiated a controversial military campaign against the PKK in the country’s southeastern Kurdish region after Ankara ended a two-year ceasefire agreement. Since the beginning of the campaign, Ankara has imposed several round-the-clock curfews, preventing Kurdish civilians from fleeing regions where the military operations are being conducted.

In March 2017, the Turkish security forces accused by UN of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in the nation’s southeast.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. Nearly 40,000 people have been killed in the resulting conflict since then.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, AP | Ekurd.net

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