Kurdish militants detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in southeast Turkey early on Sunday, killing two police officers and wounding five others, security sources said, marking the latest casualties in the region’s worst violence in two decades.
The sources said Turkish security forces at a nearby base in Sirnak province subsequently shelled a mountainous area to which the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters had fled after the attack, Reuters reported.
PKK guerrillas also launched an attack on Sunday with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles in the Silvan district of Diyarbakir province, killing one police officer and wounding another, a security source said.
In the center of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast, a curfew was declared early on Sunday in the historic Sur district, the provincial governor’s office said in a statement.
The PKK began its separatist insurgency in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict. It is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was reelected as Justice and Development Party (AKP) chairman on Saturday.
Davutoglu received all of the 1,353 valid votes (out of 1,380 party delegates) and was elected as chairman during AKP’s Fifth Ordinary Congress in Ankara as Turkey heads to parliamentary elections on Nov. 1.
Davutoglu was the only candidate.
