Killings of soldiers, policemen roils Turkey

ISTANBUL» Turks reacted with shock and anger Monday to the news that Kurdish guerrillas had executed 13 Turkish soldiers and police officers held captive in a cave in the mountains of northern Iraq.

The men were being held hostage by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Maoist guerrilla movement that has been fighting the Turkish state for more than three decades. Turkish soldiers discovered their bodies in a cave during a military operation in Iraq’s Gara region, the government said Sunday. All of the hostages had been executed, all but one with gunshots to the head, it said.

The death toll, and the manner in which the men were killed, landed like a bombshell in Turkey’s tense and divided politics. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his political allies condemned the attack, as opposition parties questioned why the government had failed to negotiate the men’s release and had risked a military operation to rescue them.

The PKK said the deaths were caused by airstrikes during the Turkish military operation that began on Feb. 10. The Turkish minister of defense, Hulusi

Akar, said that the PKK commander in charge had executed the men as soon as the operation began.

Twelve of the hostages who have been identified were junior members of the army and military police. All had been captured five or six years ago by the PKK in a period after peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdish guerrillas had broken down.

The guerrillas often set up impromptu roadblocks on remote roads in areas of eastern and southeastern Turkey, and abduct members of the armed forces traveling on public buses or private cars to go home to visit their families and return to their bases.

The men found in the cave had been abducted and taken across the border into the mountains of northern Iraq, a region that the PKK has long used as a rear base.

Ozturk Turkdogan, head of the Turkish Human Rights Association said the organization had been in touch with 10 of the hostages’ families since 2015. But despite efforts to press for negotiations, the Turkish security services had been unyielding in their pursuit of military operations, he said. Speaking on Arti TV, he also criticized the PKK for holding the hostages for so long.