Fifteen rebel Kurds, all of them women, were killed in fighting with Turkish security forces in the southeast of the country, the Turkish interior ministry has said.

The clashes took place in a rural area of Bitlis province, a centre of the armed rebellion being waged by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), according to a statement carried by the official Anatolia news agency on Saturday.

A local security source said the Kurd separatist movement had a number of women-only units and that one of these had been wiped out.

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BRITAIN is drawing up plans to send hundreds of troops and an extra nuclear sub to the Gulf as tension mounts with Iran.

Defence chiefs are convinced the UK will be swiftly sucked into any new conflict with Tehran’s fanatical regime.

They say it is a matter of WHEN not IF war breaks out - with 18 to 24 months the likely timescale.

The Army, Royal Navy and RAF will have crucial roles if hostilities are triggered by president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear stand-off with the world.

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Russian authorities say 20 militants and 11 police have been killed in several days of fighting in the volatile North Caucasus region.

Chechnya’s Moscow-backed regional leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, said his forces killed seven rebels Friday near the administrative border with neighboring province of Dagestan.

Kadyrov said in a statement that 13 other militants had been killed there earlier this week.

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One Turkish soldier and 13 militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed in two separate
clashes in Turkey’s southeast today.

The troops killed nine militants in Bingöl province, state-run TRT television reported.

Four other militants were killed in a hot pursuit following a PKK attack on a military outpost on the Iraqi border, said Gov. Muammer Türker of Hakkari province. Twenty-year-old Sgt. Metin Çetin was killed and six other soldiers were wounded in that PKK attack near the town of Çukurca.

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After more than 40 years of violent struggle for independence in the traditional Basque homeland in Spain and France, the separatist group ETA declared a unilateral end to its campaign of bombings and shootings on Thursday, saying it wished to seize a “historical opportunity to reach a just and democratic resolution to an age-old political conflict.”

The group’s announcement of “the definite cessation of its military activity,” and its appeal for a “direct dialogue” with the governments in Madrid and Paris, came in the form of a written statement and an accompanying video posted online, which were sent to news organizations.

The renunciation of armed struggle went a step further than previous cease-fires the group has declared, and often broken, over the years. It was perhaps an acknowledgment that the group had been badly weakened by a crackdown by Spanish and French security forces.

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