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Ankara (AFP) Oct 12, 2010 Turkey's parliament on Tuesday extended the government's mandate to order military strikes against Kurdish rebels holed up in neighbouring northern Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported. The approval came in a closed-door session during which the government also briefed lawmakers on its efforts find ways to end the 26-year deadly conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Under Turkish law, the minutes of closed sessions are kept in secret archives for 10 years and the media is banned from reporting on the discussions. In Tuesday's vote, 428 lawmakers in the 550-seat voted in favour of extending the mandate for another year while 18 voted against and one abstained, Anatolia said. The current one-year mandate expires on October 17. Parliament has already twice extended the mandate, which was first approved in 2007. Using intelligence supplied by the United States, the Turkish army has staged a series of air raids against rebel targets in the northern Iraqi region since December 2007, and carried out a number of ground incursions. Ankara claims some 2,000 PKK rebels have found shelter in the Kurdish-run autonomous north of Iraq and use the region as a springboard for attacks on Turkish territory. Since August last year, the ruling Justice and Devlopment Party (AKP) has been engaged in a tentative two-pronged strategy of keeping the PKK under military pressure and expanding the rights of its sizeable Kurdish population in the hope of persuading the rebels to lay down arms. Officials have recently been in contact with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, with his lawyers acting as intermediaries and holding meetings with him in his cell on the prison island of Imrali. Last month, the PKK extended a unilateral truce with Turkey by one month, but warned that a permanent ceasefire will be out of the question unless Turkey agrees to negotiate for an end to the conflict. An ultimate settlement is not seen as a short-term prospect. Ankara has already ruled out Kurdish demands for a constitutional recognition of their community as a distinct element of Turkey's population and calls for Kurdish-language education in public schools in the southeast. The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives, wrecked the economy of the impoverished region and forced the displacement of thousands.
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