SULAIMANIYAH: Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq announced on Friday they had ended their unilateral ceasefire with Turkey, as Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani paid a landmark visit to Ankara.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) statement came less than a week after six Turkish soldiers were killed in a rocket strike which a news agency close to the rebels said was claimed by the PKK.
It ends a truce declared by the rebels in April 2009, the latest in a string of such announcements over the years which Ankara has dismissed as mere propaganda ploys.
"The ceasefire with Turkey has ended… because of Turkey’s continuing hostility to the Kurdish people," PKK spokesman Ahmed Denis told AFP.
"Turkey was exploiting the ceasefire to attack our troops and arrest Kurdish political activists in Turkey."
Denis’s remarks came a day after Massoud Barzani met Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and pledged "all efforts" to stop rising rebel violence.
The PKK, which has fought Ankara since 1984, has bases in remote mountains in Barzani’s autonomous region in northern Iraq, which it uses as a launchpad for attacks on Turkish targets across the border.
Turkey often accused the Iraqi Kurds of tolerating and even aiding the PKK, but has recently toned down its rhetoric, shifting to a policy of seeking cooperation with their regional government to curb the rebels.
Last year, Ankara announced it would expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to reconcile with the restive community and encourage rebels to renounce violence.
The initiative has faltered, however, amid a string of unsettling events, including the banning of the country’s main Kurdish party in December and bloody attacks blamed on the PKK that have led to public outrage.
Blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, the PKK’s quarter-century fight for self-rule in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey has cost an estimated 45,000 lives.
