Two soldiers and three state-backed village guards were killed in two separate clashes with Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey, military sources told Reuters.
Violence between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas has escalated in recent weeks as warmer weather reaches mountains in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq where the militants are active.
The sources said the latest fighting broke out in Sirnak province close to the Iraqi border, where several thousand separatist PKK rebels are based.
The first attack killed a gendarme, special sergeant and a village guard working with Turkish forces, while a later attack saw two village guards killed and four injured in an ambush by the rebels in the Pervari district. Village guards are local civilians employed and armed by the Turkish state to combat PKK rebels.
The attacks come eight days after Turkish warplanes bombed some 50 PKK targets in northern Iraq.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of creating an independent homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. More than 40,000 people, mainly Kurds, have died in the conflict.
Reuters