ANKARA: Turkish army chief Ilker Basbug vowed on Sunday to pursue the fight against separatist Kurdish rebels unabated after five soldiers were killed in militant attacks in two days.
"If you think these attacks will deliver a blow to the determination and resolve of the Turkish armed forces in its struggle against terrorism, you are gravely mistaken," Basbug told reporters in Ankara.
"You cannot achieve anything through terrorism," he added on a visit to the mausoleum of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
In one of their deadliest attacks in months, rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fired on a military outpost in the eastern province of Tunceli with assault rifles on Friday, killing four soldiers and wounding seven.
Another soldier was killed when PKK rebels ambushed a group of soldiers on a security sweep around Lice town in Diyarbakir province late Saturday, a security source said.
The army launched operations to hunt down the attackers.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms against Ankara in 1984 for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives.
The arrival of spring usually brings a resurgence of violence as the rebels move out from their mountain hideouts in Turkey and neighboring Iraq when the snow melts.
Last year, the Turkish government announced steps to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for the PKK while keeping the rebels under military pressure to cajole them into laying down arms.
But the plan has faltered amid the banning of Turkey’s main Kurdish political party in December and a number of bloody rebel attacks that have unleashed public anger at the government.
