Turkish military shells northern Iraq: guard

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - The Turkish military struck the border area of northern Iraq on Monday, Iraqi officials said, in the latest apparent attack on Kurdish separatist PKK fighters.

Colonel Hussein Tamor, head of border guards in Iraq's northern Kurdish province of Dahuk, told Reuters that artillery shells had struck at around 4:00 p.m. (1300 GMT) in the area, which has a remote mountain border with southeastern Turkey.

A spokesman for the Kurdish Peshmerga Security forces Jabbar Yawar said there were three or four Turkish warplanes flying over Dahuk at the time of the attack.

"The bombing was very hard," Yawar said.

Both said there were no casualties in the strikes because the area was largely unpopulated.

PKK Kurdish separatist fighters use northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region as a base to launch attacks on targets in southeastern Turkey, and Turkish forces have frequently retaliated with air and artillery strikes.

Turkey has stepped up military action against the PKK since the guerrillas killed 17 soldiers in a raid into southeastern Turkey last month.

Ankara, like the European Union and United States, calls the PKK a terrorist organization. Around 40,000 people have been killed since 1984, when the PKK took up arms with a view to establishing an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey.

(Reporting by Sherko Raouf in Sulaimaniya and Shamal Aqrawi in Erbil; Editing by Dominic Evans)