Turkish warplanes bombard areas in northern Iraq

ARBIL / IraqiNews.com: Turkish warplanes bombarded areas in northern Iraq on Saturday but it was not clear whether the pounding left casualties, according to eyewitnesses. “Turkish aircraft pounded the area of Nirwa Rikan, east of al-Imadiya town on Saturday. The area, though remote and clear of any local residents, is home to headquarters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK),” an eyewitness near the attacked areas told IraqiNews.com news agency. The Turkish army had waged in December 2007 a series of air raids on PKK bases in northern Iraq and a weeklong ground operation in February 2008. Since then the Turkish military has been launching lightning attacks with artillery and military aircraft on certain PKK targets inside Iraqi territories. The PKK, or  Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan  in Kurdish, was founded in 1974. It is made up primarily of Turkish Kurds and its goal is the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in predominantly Kurdish southeast Turkey. The organization evolved out of the leftist student groups active in Turkey in the 1960s. Ankara blames the separatist group for the deaths of 40,000 since 1984, when the group took up arms to carve out an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey. The United States and the European Union, along with Turkey, consider the PKK a terrorist organization.   AmR (TS) 1283