The fighting began when a group of militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) opened fire on Turkish border guards from three separate positions on the Iraqi side of the frontier, the report said.

The authorities said a number of other PKK casualties -- both dead and wounded -- were carried by fellow militants into Iraq, it said.

PKK rebels have long taken refuge in remote mountainous bases in Kurdish-run northern Iraq which they use as a launching pad for attacks against Turkish targets across the border.

Anatolia said in an earlier report that the fighting took place inside Turkey's southeastern border province of Sirnak after the army detected that PKK militants had sneaked in from Iraq.

The head of the autonomous Kurdish administration of northern Iraq, Massud Barzani, pledged "all efforts" to stop PKK violence against Turkey when he paid a landmark visit to Ankara earlier this month after years of animosity.

In another incident late Tuesday, a suspected PKK militant was arrested in Turkey's southeastern city of Hakkari on suspicion that he was planning an attack on the police, Anatolia said.

The suspect carried a rocket launcher, hand grenades, a gun and bullets when anti-terror police surrounded and detained him in the city centre, it said.

A PKK rocket attack on a navy base in the southern Mediterranean port of Iskenderun last month claimed the lives of six soldiers.

The PKK, listed as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and much of the international community, has recently stepped up attacks against the security forces in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.

The surging violence followed remarks by jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan that he was abandoning efforts to seek dialogue with Ankara and leaving PKK commanders in charge in the conflict, which has claimed some 45,000 lives since the rebels took up arms in 1984.