(dpa) - A senior member of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) said its forces killed 18 Turkish soldiers and wounded two on Thursday in a mountainous area in northern Iraq, media reports said.
"We (the PKK) managed to kill three Turkish soldiers and wound another two when our forces set an ambush in the Dojka mountains near Zab," Ahmed Damis, a senior PKK official, told the Iraqi news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
He added that the PKK killed another 15 Turkish troops during clashes with Kurdish forces in the eastern Imadiya area.
Turkish forces started to withdraw after the attack, but then hit the PKK forces with airstrikes, Damis said.
There was no independent confirmation of the PKK account of new Turkish casualties. By official Turkish military accounts, so far 230 PKK fighters and 24 Turkish soldiers had been killed since Turkey's "Operation Gunes" incursion began on the night of February 21.