ANKARA (AFP) -- Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel targets in neighboring Iraq on Saturday as the country’s president said Ankara would pursue dialogue with Iraqi Kurds accused of harboring militants in a safe haven.

The Turkish general staff said 31 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) positions in the Harkurk area along the border were successfully hit overnight, and were then targeted with artillery fire.
The jets returned safely to their bases, it said, without giving other details.
It was the sixth Turkish air raid in northern Iraq since October 3 when PKK rebels crossing from their bases in the region attacked a Turkish border outpost.
Seventeen soldiers and at least 23 militants were killed, according to army figures.
The daytime assault was followed on Wednesday by a machine-gun attack on a police bus in Diyarbakir, the main city of Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast, which claimed five lives.
The bus came under fire just as parliament extended by a year the government’s mandate to order cross-border military operations in northern Iraq against the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community.
Ankara has often accused the autonomous Kurdish administration of northern Iraq of tolerating the PKK on its territory and even aiding the rebels, who, it says, obtain weapons and explosives in the region for use in attacks against Turkish targets across the border.
But President Abdullah Gul said on Saturday that Ankara would pursue dialogue with the Iraqi Kurds to resolve the issue, saying that “an authority vacuum” in the rugged mountains along the Turkish border was helping the PKK to use the area as a safe haven.
“There is nothing more normal than having dialogue with the northern Iraqis... in the struggle against terrorism,” he told reporters.
Gul said Iraqi Kurds would also benefit from helping Ankara, stressing that “the stability, security and prosperity of Iraq goes through cooperation with Turkey.”
Turkish diplomats began meeting with Iraqi Kurdish officials in May after a long period of chilly ties, but after the PKK attack on the outpost, the Turkish army charged again that the Iraqi Kurds were aiding the rebels.
The Iraqi authorities have repeatedly pledged efforts to curb the PKK, but say the group’s hideouts are in mountainous regions to which access is difficult.
Turkey’s civilian and military leadership is scheduled to convene Tuesday to outline fresh measures to combat the rebels after an initial meeting Thursday.
The Turkish army has carried out a series of air raids and a week-long ground incursion against PKK camps in northern Iraq since the government obtained its first one-year mandate for cross-border military action on October 17, 2007.
Turkish forces have killed about 640 PKK militants this year, some 400 of them in cross-border operations in northern Iraq, according to army figures.
The PKK took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey’s southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 44,000 lives.