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Turkish leaders mourn soldiers killed in PKK clash
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday Kurdish militants would "drown in their own blood" as he lead political and army chiefs in paying respects to troops killed in a clash with the rebels.
The fighting on Saturday, which marked a fresh escalation in the 26-year-old insurgency, killed 11 soldiers and 12 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in the southeastern province of Hakkari, near the border with Iraq.
The soldiers' coffins, draped in red-and-white Turkish flags, were laid out on tables for a ceremony at a military base in the city of Van where Erdogan and armed forces chief General Ilker Basbug listened to a Muslim prayer with other leaders.
"Today we will not make the traitors happy," Erdogan said. "We will defend this ground heroically. Resolute against enemies, resolute against terrorism."
"I say here very clearly, they will not win. They will gain nothing. They will melt away in their own darkness...they will drown in their own blood," he said.
The death toll in Saturday's clash was one of the highest in recent years in a conflict which has killed more than 40,000 people since the PKK took up arms against the state in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in the southeast.