A top Kurdish PKK commander has called on Kurds living in Turkish cities to rise up and fight the authorities following Turkey's ground offensive into northern Iraq, the pro-PKK Firat news agency said on Sunday. "If they want to destroy us, our young people must make (Turkey's) cities uninhabitable," the agency quoted Bahoz Erdal, a senior PKK commander in northern Iraq, as saying.
"In the big cities, Kurdish youth must give their reply to the military operations. Kurdistan's guerrillas are not just 7,000 or 10,000, they number hundreds of thousands. They are everywhere ... in all Turkish cities," Erdal said. Just a couple of youths could, for example, set fire to hundreds of vehicles, he added.
"We are not against the Turkish people but such is the logic of war," Erdal said in his statement.
Meanwhile, PKK fighters said on Sunday they had shot down a Turkish Cobra attack helicopter during clashes with Turkish forces in northern Iraq. "At 6 p.m. (1500 GMT) yesterday, our fighters shot down a Cobra helicopter," Ahmed Danees, head of foreign relations for the PKK told Reuters. "The clashes are still ongoing. Yesterday evening there was artillery shelling and air strikes on the PKK inside Iraq," he added.
