Turkish troops surrounded around 100 rebels in the Ikiyaka mountains in the southeast corner of the country and prevented them from returning to their bases in Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported Monday.

Media reports said some 100,000 troops had completed their week-long deployment along the Iraqi border at the weekend.

Meanwhile, national red and white crescent and star flags decorated the country, marking the anniversary of the secular republic's creation by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, "father of the Turks", on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

As officials, led by President Abdullah Gul, made the traditional October 29 trek to Ataturk's imposing mausoleum on a hill overlooking Ankara, an eighth day of popular demonstrations were scheduled to protest against the PKK Kurdish rebel group.

The separatist organisation, considered a terrorist group by much of the international community, has fought for self-rule in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

Countrywide protest rallies against the group began spontaneously on October 21, the day 12 Turkish soldiers were killed and eight taken prisoner in a PKK ambush near the Iraqi border.

The army has reported killing more than 60 rebels since, but has yet to confirm media reports Sunday that another 15 were killed in fighting in eastern Tunceli province, hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the frontier with Iraq.

Talks between Turkey and Iraq collapsed here Friday, adding momentum to Turkey's threat to send troops to northern Iraq to wipe out bases where some 3,500 PKK rebels are believed to be holed up.

Ankara had asked Baghdad to submit "concrete proposals" to end the safe haven and support the PKK enjoys in Kurdish Iraqi-administered autonomous northern Iraq, but said it found the Iraqi offers "unsatisfactory," if "well-intentioned."

Turkey will launch a military operation "when it deems necessary," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday, as Ankara increasingly expresses exasperation at what it considers US and Iraqi inaction.

Erdogan and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are to meet Thursday in a further bid to settle the conflict through diplomacy before Rice attends a foreign ministers' conference of Iraq's neighbours Friday and Saturday in Istanbul.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari is also expected to attend.

The culminating point of diplomatic efforts will likely come on November 5, when Erdogan is scheduled to meet US President George W. Bush at the White House.

It will be the first meeting between the two since Erdogan's governing Justice and Development Party won snap elections, with a huge share of the vote, on July 22.

Washington wants to avoid destabilising the relatively peaceful north of Iraq, administered by its Iraqi Kurd allies, but NATO-member Turkey, traditionally the closest US supporter in the region, says it has reached the limits of its patience.

Turkish soldiers and equipment have massed along the Iraqi border in the past week. The deployment of some 100,000 troops and anti-PKK Kurdish militia appeared complete at the weekend, media reports said.

On Friday, General Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of general staff, said it was unlikely that any military operation would take place before the Erdogan-Bush talks.