The Turkish military Sunday accused Iraqi Kurds of aiding Turkish Kurdish rebels holed up in their autonomous enclave in northern Iraq after the militants killed at least 15 soldiers in a daytime attack near the border.
The charge came from the deputy chief of the army as top government and military officials joined thousands of mourners across the country for the funerals of the soldiers slain in Friday's attack by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels on a military outpost in the mountainous southeast.
"We have no support at all from the northern Iraqi administration (against the rebels). Let aside any support, they are providing (the rebels with) infrastructural capabilities such as hospitals and roads," General Hasan Igsiz told a press conference here.
"Our expectation is that (the PKK) be acknowledged as a terrorist organisation there and that support for the rebels be eliminated," he said.
Ankara charges that thousands of PKK rebels easily obtain weapons and explosives in northern Iraq for attacks on Turkish targets across the border.
Iraqi authorities have repeatedly pledged to curb the PKK, but say that the group's hideouts in mountainous regions are difficult to access.
"There are measures to be taken against the (PKK) hideouts. We are expecting positive action on the ground," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said as he joined an estimated crowd of 2,000 in Armutlu, a village near Ankara, to lay one of the soldiers to rest.
Senior officials will meet Thursday to discuss further measures against the rebels, Erdogan added after the funeral where mourners shouted anti-PKK slogans.
"The martyrs are immortal, the motherland is indivisible," the crowd chanted as soldiers carried the coffin, wrapped in a Turkish flag, on their shoulders.
Television stations estimated that about 10,000 people attended the funerals held in 13 provinces.
In southeastern Turkey, the army moved soldiers and equipment to border regions while helicopters flew reconnaissance flights over routes used by the PKK and soldiers positioned howitzers in the mountains, Anatolia news agency reported.
In the bloodiest fighting this year, PKK rebels attacked the outpost, located in a deep valley surrounded by rugged mountains in the border province of Hakkari, Friday afternoon under cover of heavy weapons fire from neighbouring northern Iraq, killing 15 soldiers.
Twenty-three rebels were killed in the ensuing fighting lasting late into the night during which Turkish forces responded with artillery fire and attack helicopters pounded rebel positions.
Igsiz said two other soldiers still remained unaccounted for and a search was underway, but added that the army believed them to have been killed.
"If they had been captured (by the rebels), we would have seen some signs," Igsiz said.
After an initial air strike on Friday against a group of rebels inside Iraq, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the attacked station, fighter jets struck at rebels fleeing after attacking the outpost in a second cross-border strike Saturday, the army said in statement Sunday.
"The planes returned safely to base after successfully completing their mission," it said, without further details.
The PKK said in a statement carried by an agency close to the rebels that they had killed 62 soldiers and wounded more than 30 others in Friday's attack. It put its own losses at nine rebels.
Friday's attack came just days before the Turkish parliament was set to vote on extending by one year the government's mandate to order military strikes against PKK bases in northern Iraq.
Under a one-year parliamentary authorisation voted last October, the army has carried out several air strikes and a week-long ground incursion against PKK targets, using intelligence passed on by NATO ally Washington.
The current authorisation expires October 17.
The PKK -- considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union -- took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 44,000 lives.
