The rebels, killed in fighting in the provinces of Mardin and Hakkari, included senior members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has led a bloody 25-year insurgency in the region, unnamed sources told Anatolia news agency, without specifying when the operations took place.

Military officials contacted by AFP were only able to confirm that operations against the PKK were under way in the region.

Iranian security forces also targetted the rebels, Anatolia said, without elaborating.

Hakkari province lies in Turkey's southeastern corner where the country's borders with Iran and Iraq meet.

The PKK has a sister group in Iran and many militants are holed up in rare bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, from where they sneak into Turkey and Iran.

Turkish and Iranian forces have in the past carried out simultaneous military action against PKK rebels in northern Iraq, targeting them with artillery fire across the borders.

In a related development, nine militants who abandoned PKK camps in northern Iraq surrendered to the Turkish authorities at the border crossing between the two countries late Wednesday, judicial officials said.

They were being questioned there Thursday.

Ankara has pledged reforms to expand Kurdish freedoms in a bid to erode popular support for the PKK, which it considers a terrorist group, and end the conflict in the southeast, which has claimed some 45,000 lives.

The government's fence-mending efforts however faltered last week amid violent Kurdish protests over claims that the prison conditions of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan have deteriorated. Ankara denies the claims.

On Monday, seven soldiers were killed in an ambush in northern Turkey, where leftist militants and more rarely PKK rebels are active. Officials are yet to name the suspected perpetrators of the attack.

The climate was further strained Tuesday as the constitutional court began final deliberations on whether to outlaw the Democratic Society Party, Turkey's main Kurdish political movement, on charges of links to the PKK.