Kurdish leader calls for 'honourable resistance' after Turkish forces kill 55

A leading pro-Kurdish politician has called on Kurds to resist after the Turkish army reported it had killed 55 Kurdish “militants” in a four-day crackdown on two towns in Turkey's southeast.

Operations in Cizre and Silopi began on Tuesday, with the army reporting it had killed 25 fighters linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the first two days.

One police officer was also reportedly killed on Friday, the first in an operation involving more than 10,000 troops.

Selahattin Demirtas, the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) on Friday called for people in the southeast to resist the attacks.

"We call on our people to expand the struggle and to embrace this honourable resistance," he told journalists.

"If they think they can make us take a step back by showing a tank gun, they are wrong. We fear nobody but God. We call on all civil society groups to embrace resistance in the lands of Kurdistan.”

A number of areas in southeastern Turkey have declared autonomy from the central government, with often armed activists mainly from the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H) - the youth wing of the PKK - digging trenches, building barricades and clashing with police officers.

The pro-PKK Firat News Agency reported on Friday that an 11-year old boy had been shot by police in Cizre, and that dozens of houses in Silopi had been razed in bombardment by Turkish tanks and artillery.

It also said that about 100 people were trapped by artillery fire in a basement of a house in Zap area in Silopi.

The rhetoric on all sides of the conflict has been escalating as the death toll continues to rise in the southeast.

Speaking in Konya on Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said operations would continue in Silopi and Cizre until the area was “cleansed”.

“You will be annihilated in those houses, those buildings, those ditches which you have dug,” he told a crowd in Konya, referring to Kurdish militants. “Our security forces will continue this fight until it has been completely cleansed and a peaceful atmosphere established.”

Fighting between Kurdish militants and the Turkish state began afresh in July following a bombing allegedly carried out by Islamic State against pro-Kurdish activists in the border town of Suruc and the collapse of a two-year ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK.

The PKK has been engaged in a guerilla war against the Turkish state since 1984. In the ensuing decades over 40,000 people are thought to have lost their lives and atrocities carried out on both sides.