(Adds five PKK killed) TUNCELI, Turkey, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Five Kurdish guerrillas and one Turkish security official were killed in clashes in southeastern Turkey on Wednesday, army sources said. The sources said Turkish troops, backed by helicoper gunships, attacked a group of around 30 guerrillas in Sirnak province on the Iraqi border. The operation is continuing and there could be more casualties, the sources said. A Turkish security official was killed in an attack by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants on a gendarme station in the eastern Anatolian province of Bitlis late on Tuesday, security officials said earlier on Wednesday. The militants who attacked the station escaped. The violence came after the Turkish military launched a 10,000-soldier offensive earlier this week against the PKK operating in neighbouring provinces. Army sources said operations against the guerrillas would be expanded. The PKK took up arms against the state in 1984 with the aim of carving out an ethnic Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey. More than 30,000 people have died in the conflict, which subsided for several years after the capture of the group's leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999. However, fighting has flared up again in the last couple of years with large numbers of the militants crossing the border from northern Iraq, where they are holed up in mountain bases.
