A news report on PKK terrorists by Turkish press agency Anadolu Agency (AA) was twisted and falsified by Dutch media outlets on Monday in an attempt to show the operations against PKK terror group as if they were conducted against the civilian Kurdish population.
"Turkish security forces have slain 5,359 Kurdish fighters since July last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told Anadolu news agency Monday" said the Dutch broadcaster PowNed in a piece posted at 14:49 local time.
The piece titled "Erdogan: Turkish forces killed 5,300 Kurds" was also shared by Trouw, a tabloid Dutch newspaper.
The piece continues with inconsistent statements like: "The Kurdish separatist PKK said that the terrorist organization had already abandoned a two-year ceasefire in July," and stating that the violence has killed 355 soldiers and police officers mainly in southeastern Turkey.
But in fact, Erdoğan had said: "Within the same period [from July 2015 until now] 5,359 terrorists have been killed, injured or detained within the country and abroad," in a speech Monday at the military academy in Istanbul, as quoted by Anadolu Agency.
The AA piece, which was twisted, actually headlined with "5.359 terrorists neutralized in 265 days" and comprises of data obtained from the military on the anti-terror operations in the country's southeast.
In the report, it states that among the 5,359 terrorists most were members of the PKK but there were also Deash, the PKK's urban youth branch the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) , left-wing organization Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) militants
The report goes on to state that 5.359 terrorists were 'neutralized', 3,583 of whom were killed, 601 injured, and 574 who surrendered to Turkish security forces.
Between July 7, 2015 and March 27, 2016, 215 soldiers, 133 police officers and 7 village guards were killed by terrorists in attacks, the report adds.
In contrast to the PowNed piece, a Dutch news website nieuws.turkije.net posted the same news with the headline "Erdogan: Turkish forces killed 5,300 PKK terrorists since July 2015", reported by the Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANP), the largest news agency in the Netherlands. This piece shows the misinterpretation and/or intentional distortion by PowNed and Trouw.
PowNed, which is abbreviation for "Public broadcaster (for the) well-thinking Netherlands and the like", argues heavily in a tongue-in-cheek style and often tries to ridicule prominent political figures.
