Turkish Helicopters Strike Inside Iraq

Turkish helicopter gunships attacked abandoned villages inside Iraq on Tuesday, Iraqi officials said, in the first such strike since border tensions have escalated in recent months.

A spokesman for the Kurdish regional administration, Jamal Abdullah, denied the report but said two Turkish warplanes dropped flares Monday in the mountains near Zakhu.

But Col. Hussein Tamir, an Iraqi army officer who supervises border guards, said the airstrikes occurred before dawn on abandoned villages northeast of Zakhu, an Iraqi Kurdish town near the border with Turkey. There were no casualties, he said.

A spokesman for the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, corroborated Tamir's account of the airstrikes, and said sporadic clashes had been taking place inside Turkey since late Monday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.