Turkey’s military said Tuesday its air strikes on suspected Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq this week have killed an estimated 90 to 100 guerrillas and warned that it would press ahead with offensives against the group both inside Turkey and across the border.

In a statement posted on its website, the military also said more than 80 rebels were injured in six days of cross-border air raids that began on Wednesday, hours after eight soldiers and a government-paid village guard were killed in an ambush by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, near the border with Iraq.

“According to initial information obtained, between 90 and 100 terrorists were rendered ineffective, more than 80 wounded terrorists were moved to hospitals or villages, and contact with a high number of terrorists was cut,” the military said. “Rendered ineffective” is a term used by the military to refer to rebels killed.

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The Turkish government’s offensive against the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK has continued for a third night, with airstrikes against rebels in northern Iraq.

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Alleged members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, shot dead one major and six Turkish soldiers in an ambush in the eastern province of Hakkari’s Çukurca district Wednesday morning.

Eleven more soldiers were also injured in the attack.

“They (the PKK) are trying to test our patience. We will defeat them by acting within the scope of the law and democracy. Everybody will see us defeat them,” said Turkish National Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz.

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Russian forces in the restive north Caucasus Dagestan region killed seven suspected rebels, including a top commander, Russia’s anti-terror committee said Thursday.

One of those killed during the operation conducted on Wednesday and Thursday in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala was Abdullah Magomedaliev, the committee said, according to Russian news agencies.

The gunman, who was born in 1977, was described as “the leader of a battalion specialised in spectacular attacks against the security forces.”

“Magomedaliev trained a suicide bomber and planned the the suicide attack against interior ministry base in Bouinaksk that killed 56 troops in September 2010,” the committee said.

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In a move that self-styled Caucasus Emirate head and insurgency commander Doku Umarov has hailed as marking “a new page” in the ongoing jihad against the Russian presence in the North Caucasus, several of the senior Chechen commanders who one year ago split with Umarov have reaffirmed their allegiance to him.

Their reasons for doing so remain unclear, however, as does the position of several of their most respected fellow commanders.

The catalyst for the split in the ranks of the Chechen insurgents was Umarov’s retraction last August, just days after it was posted to the Internet, of an announcement that he was stepping down as emir, and proposing as his successor veteran commander Aslanbek Vadalov.

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