Turkish army says five Kurdish rebels killed in clashes

Five rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were killed and four Turkish soldiers wounded in a day of clashes, the army said, in a blow to a fragile peace process to end a decades-long insurgency.
The army said yesterday Turkish troops had been dispatched to the district of Diaydin in the Agri region of southeast Turkey after receiving intelligence of a planned "festival" to promote the "separatist terror organisation".
This is official shorthand for the PKK, banned as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and EU and whose actual name is never used by the authorities.

After being fired on, the army said it sent armed helicopters, reconnaissance jets and a commando unit to the region to battle more than two dozen militants.
In a statement on its website, the army confirmed that four Turkish soldiers had been wounded in the clashes.
"On the other side, five terrorists were killed and one wounded was captured," it said.

The army said that three of the Turkish soldiers were not severely wounded and their lives were not in danger but the fourth had undergone an operation in hospital.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the PKK of seeking "to dynamite the peace in our country and undermine the peace process", in a televised speech in the western city of Sakarya on the Black Sea.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu wrote on Twitter "that the army was giving the necessary response to the treacherous attack."
According to the pro-Kurdish DIHA news agency, one "civilian" was killed by the army, naming him as former local politician Cezmi Budak.
It said another civilian had been wounded and six others detained. However there was no official confirmation of this information.
The unrest marks a alarming spike in violence as the government seeks to make peace with the PKK after a decades-long conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives.
Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) that acts as an intermediary between the government and PKK, called the clashes "a sad and worrying development".

"A detailed investigation is needed to find out exactly what happened," he said in televised comments.
Reports on pro-Kurdish news sites disputed the army's version of events, saying that the military had launched an operation against a "tree planting event" led by local politicians.