DIYARBAKIR (Turkey), Aug 12: Twelve soldiers were injured, three of them seriously, on Sunday when Kurdish guerillas detonated a roadside bomb in southeast Turkey, military officials said.

They said militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) planted the bomb on a country road in the Eruh district of Siirt province near the border with Iraq and exploded it as a minibus carrying the troops passed by.

Soldiers launched an operation in the region to capture the rebels.

Roadside bombs have become an increasingly common tactic of the PKK which launched a separatist insurgency in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.—Reuters