Turkey: PKK attacks army and police as tensions mount

Several people, including army officers and a policeman have been killed in separate attacks blamed on Kurdish rebels in southern Turkey, as tensions in the country mounted after Ankara waded into the Syrian conflict.

The Turkish army said three soldiers were shot dead by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who attacked an army convoy in the south-eastern Sirnak province. A gun battle ensued, with army helicopters also dispatched to the area.

Earlier, suspected PKK gunmen killed a police officer and a civilian opened fire on a tea house from a speeding car in Diyarbakir city.

The attacks followed government forces' heavy bombardment of Kurdish positions in northern Iraq, a move condemned by Baghdad.

The violence is pushing Turkey again to the brink of civil war, shattering a peace process started in 2012 that has now become unfeasible according to President Tayyip Erdogan.

Hostilities flared up earlier this month, as Ankara pledged to wage war on all terrorism in the wake of a suicide bombing that killed 32 socialist youth volunteers in the southern city of Suruc, on the Turkish side of the Syrian border.

The massacre was blamed on the Islamic State (Isis) jihadi group, which is fighting against Kurdish militias in Iraq and Syria.

Shortly afterwards, the PKK, a banned Marxist-Leninist separatist movement that accuses President Erdogan of tolerating or even supporting IS as an indirect way of curbing Kurdish hopes to form an independent state, carried out a spree of retaliatory deadly attacks on Turkish security forces.

In response, Ankara ended its long reluctance to get directly involved in the Syrian conflict, launching a campaign against IS, while also clamping down on the PKK at home as well as targeting its Kurdish allies across the border.