Kurdish rebels die in suicide attack bid

Two separatist Kurdish rebels were killed when a fuel tanker they were planning to ram into a military outpost in a suicide attack exploded before they could approach, officials said today.

The rebels drove the tanker toward the Karsilar outpost in the eastern province of Tunceli late last night but were stopped by guards who fired at it.

The tanker caught fire and exploded, an official from the local governor’s office said.

The militants had earlier stopped the tanker at a road nearby and hijacked it at gunpoint, the official said.

Separately, another group of rebels attacked the outpost with automatic rifles and rockets, the official said, but no one was killed in that attack. The security forces launched an operation, backed with helicopter gunships, in the region in retaliation, the official said.

The Turkish military is carrying out several offensives against the rebels in southeast Turkey while the country’s political and military leaders are debating whether to stage an incursion into northern Iraq to try to root out rebel bases there.

Turkey has been building up its military forces on the Iraqi border amid stepped-up attacks by the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, who often stage raids in southeast Turkey after crossing over from hide-outs in Iraq.

Earlier this month, Kurdish rebels rammed a vehicle into another military outpost in Tunceli province and attacked it with hand grenades and automatic weapons, killing seven soldiers. Karsilar was the target of a similar attack last year, which killed two soldiers.

PKK guerrillas took up arms in 1984, and tens of thousand of people have died in the conflict for autonomy in southeast Turkey.

The US and European Union brand the PKK a terrorist organisation.

The US is opposed to a large scale incursion for fear of seeing the relatively stable part of war-torn Iraq slide into chaos.

Today thousands of people gathered in a main square in the north-western Turkish city of Bursa in protest of increased PKK violence that has killed more than two dozen soldiers since May.

More than a thousand Turks marched silently in Istanbul in a similar protest yesterday.

The protests follow a call by the Turkish military for people to show “mass reaction” to the rebel attacks.