Turkish Warplanes Kill 35 In Air Strike

Turkish warplanes have killed at least 35 people near the country's border with Iraq after smugglers were apparently mistaken for Kurdish militants, according to officials.
Turkey's Dogan news agency said the attacks happened near the village of Ortasu in Sirnak near Iraq, where Kurdish rebels are based.
It claimed the raids were launched after drones and thermal cameras located a "crowded group" in the area.
Strikes are regularly carried out in the region as part of the country's battle against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas and have been stepped up following a PKK attack in August.
Fehmi Yaman, the mayor of Uludere in Sirnak province, said: "We have 30 corpses, all of them are burned. The state knew that these people were smuggling in the region. This kind of incident is unacceptable. They were hit from the air."
The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) said in a statement that 35 people had been killed and that party leaders were heading for the area.
Joint BDP chairman Selahattin Demirtas said the party had announced a three-day period of mourning and would hold demonstrations in Istanbul and elsewhere.
Mr Demirtas was quoted as saying: "It is clear there was a massacre. They will try to cover it up... We will not allow them to cover it up."
Smuggling is an important source of income for locals in provinces along the Iraqi border, with many villagers involved in bringing fuel, cigarettes and other goods from Iraqi villages.
Television images showed a line of corpses covered by blankets on a barren hillside, with a crowd of people gathered around - some with their heads in their hands and crying.
People loaded the bodies onto donkeys which were led down the hill to be loaded into vehicles and taken to hospital in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country.
Security sources said the people killed had been carrying canisters of diesel on mules and that their bodies were found on the Iraqi side of the border.
The Firat news agency, which has close ties to the PKK, said that 17 people were still believed to be missing. It said those killed were aged around 17 to 20.
The Turkish military confirmed it had launched the strikes after unmanned drones spotted suspected PKK members but insisted there had been no civilians in the area.
"It was established from unmanned aerial vehicle images that a group was within Iraq heading towards our border," it said.
"Given that the area in which the group was spotted is often used by terrorists and that it was moving towards our border at night, it was deemed necessary for our air force planes to attack.
"The place where the incident occurred is the Sinat-Haftanin area in northern Iraq where there is no civilian settlement and where the main camps of the separatist terrorist group are located.
"An administrative and legal investigation and procedures regarding the incident are continuing."
The PKK, regarded as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the US, launches attacks on Turkish forces from hideouts inside the remote Iraqi mountains.
Turkey and Iran have often skirmished with rebels in the region and Turkish leaders vowed revenge in October after the PKK killed 24 Turkish soldiers in raids on military outposts in the south east.
It was one of the deadliest attacks since the PKK took up arms in 1984 in a conflict which has seen more than 40,000 people killed.
Following its recent withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the US has deployed four Predator drones to Turkey to help the fight against the rebels.