TURKEY:Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan convened an emergency meeting of Turkey's top-ranking security officials, including the ministers of defence and the interior, in Ankara last night to decide on retaliation for an ambush by Kurdish separatists that killed 17 Turkish soldiers and wounded 16 others yesterday.
The Turkish general staff said 23 rebels were killed.
Turkey's parliament last Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to authorise a military incursion into northern Iraq, where Ankara says some 3,500 guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are based.
Turkey maintains about 60,000 troops along the border.
Mr Erdogan fears being drawn into a quagmire, but public and military pressure after this latest attack make it unlikely that he can continue to postpone action.
Experts say the operation is likely to take the form of aerial bombardment of PKK bases and raids by special forces on precise locations in the mountains, rather than massive troop movements.
Yesterday's PKK attack occurred in the south-eastern Hakkari province, near the town of Yuksekova, state news agency Anatolia said. The PKK unit reportedly used heavy weapons. Iraqi officials said Turkish forces responded by shelling into northern Iraq, where no casualties were reported.
A pro-PKK website claimed rebels took hostages, including Turkish soldiers. Turkish media initially spoke of 10 soldiers missing in action, but subsequently dropped the reports. Another unconfirmed report said a landmine blew up a Turkish civilian minibus near the border.
Earlier PKK attacks, on September 29th and October 8th, killed 28 Turkish soldiers and civilians.
On Saturday, Mr Erdogan said Turkey expected the US to take action against the PKK, but would take its own measures if it saw no results. Turkey tabled the resolution authorising multiple incursions over the coming year despite pleas for restraint from the US, Iraq, EU and UN.
Iraqi Kurds have sent conflicting signals in recent days.Massoud Barzani, president of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, said on Friday that if Turkey attacked, "under whatever pretext, we will be completely ready to defend our democratic experiment, the dignity of our people and the sanctity of our homeland".
The Turkish government refuses to recognise or talk to Mr Barzani's regional government, insisting that it will negotiate only with the national government in Baghdad.
Ankara says it will attack only the PKK - not Iraqi Kurds - but fighting risks ballooning into a Turkish-Iraqi conflict if the Iraqi Peshmerga forces, who support the PKK, become involved.
High-ranking Kurds in Baghdad have adopted a more conciliatory line than Mr Barzani.
"The PKK should now understand that the world has changed and that the era of Che Guevaras is over," Iraqi president Jalal Talabani told French newspaper Le Figaro. "I am telling the PKK to go to Turkey and join discussions in parliament," he added.
The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who is also Kurdish, said Iraq wanted the PKK to leave northern Iraq "as soon as possible".
The PKK "is not present with the approval of the Iraqi government or the government of the Kurdish region", he said.
Asked if there would be a military response to Kurdish attacks, Turkish defence minister Vecdi Gonul, speaking in Kiev, Ukraine, after talks with US defence secretary Robert Gates, said: "Not urgently. They [ Turkish troops] are planning a cross-border [ incursion] . . . We'd like to do these things with the Americans."
Mr Gates said he did not believe Ankara would launch a major operation imminently.
Meanwhile, Turkish voters resoundingly backed plans in a referendum yesterday to have future presidents elected by the people instead of by parliament.
Preliminary results showed about 70 per cent of voters approved the constitutional changes proposed by Mr Erdogan's ruling centre-right AK Party.