Officials: Turkey Strikes Inside Iraq

Turkish helicopter gunships attacked abandoned villages inside Iraq on Tuesday, Iraqi officials said, the first such airstrike since border tensions have escalated in recent months.

It also was the first major Turkish action against Kurdish rebels since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met President Bush in Washington earlier this month.

Col. Hussein Tamir, an Iraqi Army officer who supervises border guards, said the airstrikes occurred before dawn on abandoned villages near Zakhu, an Iraqi Kurdish town near the border with Turkey. There were no casualties, he said.

A spokesman for the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, corroborated …