Turkey announced on Tuesday that its forces had destroyed 12 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq.
The targets, in northern Iraq’s Qandil, Hakurk and Avasin-Basyan regions, included shelters and ammunition depots, said the military.
The overnight air strikes are part of an offensive Turkey has launched against militant targets in Iraq’s Qandil region.
The army also said that 34 militants had been “neutralized” in operations in northern Iraq between June 1 and June 8. The military uses the term “neutralized” to refer to operations in which opposition forces have been killed, wounded or captured.
Turkey will remain in northern Iraq until all terrorist groups are removed, Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a roundtable interview with the state-run Anadolu news agency, he revealed Ankara was in full agreement with Baghdad on the operation.
The PKK, which has waged a three-decade insurgency in Turkey’s largely Kurdish southeast, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Europe and Turkey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces presidential elections on June 24, on Monday said Turkey would drain the “terror swamp” in Qandil.
He said that air strikes against the region “were far from over.”
"We have begun our operations in Qandil and Sinjar," Erdogan told a rally in the Anatolian province of Nigde.
"Twenty of our planes destroyed 14 important targets. They struck and came back. It's not over and it will continue," he said.
The Turkish army on Sunday had already announced it had hit 14 targets in air raids on Qandil.
A presidential source later specified that Erdogan's comments related only to Qandil and not Sinjar, another area in northern Iraq where the PKK has a presence.
Analysts say that a major operation against the PKK in northern Iraq would give Erdogan a welcome boost in the snap polls which are expected to be tighter than initially predicted.
But an extensive ground operation would also be fraught with risk, given the complex mountainous terrain of the Qandil region which is well known to the PKK but not the Turkish army.
Ankara earlier this year successfully carried out a major cross-border incursion into Syria along with allied Syrian rebels, taking the Afrin region in the northwest from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
