The three soldiers were shot dead, and another four were wounded, during a military operation against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the mountains of Sirnak province near Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Two news channels reported that five soldiers had been killed.

Reinforcements were sent to the region, where the operation is continuing, Anatolia said.

Separately, a policemen died from injuries sustained during a PKK attack on a police station in the province of Bingol, hospital sources said.

The officer was wounded late Tuesday when rebels opened fire with automatic weapons fire on the station in the town of Genc.

More than 37,000 people have been killed since 1984, when the PKK -- considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union -- took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey.

The latest deaths followed a week of violence that claimed 15 lives as Kurdish rioters clashed with security forces in Istanbul and Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast.

Police opened fire to disperse the demonstrators, many of them in their teens, who torched banks and public buildings, vandalized shops and threw Molotov cocktails.

The death toll included three women killed Sunday in Istanbul when a petrol bomb attack set a bus on fire, causing it to crash into another vehicle.

The Turkish government has accused the PKK of orchestrating the unrest that first erupted on March 28 in Diyarbakir, the biggest city of the region, after the funerals of PKK militants killed in clashes with the army.