Turkey has launched a fresh wave of airstrikes against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today, part of an ongoing effort to weaken and destroy the group known as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Addressing a campaign rally in the central Anatolian Nigde province, Erdogan said, “We’ve started anti-terror operations in Qandil and Sinjar. We have destroyed 14 important targets with our aircraft. … The [job] is not finished yet.”

Qandil refers to the chain of towering mountains separating Iraq from Iran where the PKK’s top commanders are based. Sinjar, a Yazidi-dominated area with its own smaller mountain, separates Iraq from Syria. Turkey’s strategic goal is to disrupt the flow of PKK fighters between Qandil and Syria, where their sister group known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) controls broad swaths of territory with the support of the US-led coalition against the Islamic State. Turkey labels both groups terrorists and has intensified pressure on them in recent months, driving the YPG out of Afrin, a mainly Kurdish enclave in northwestern Syria, with Russia’s help in March. Erdogan said Turkey had “neutralized” 4,500 militants in Afrin. “We will drain the terror swamp in Qandil just like we cleansed Afrin, Jarablus, al-Bab and Azaz from the hordes of killers,” he declared.

Rebel sources contacted via WhatsApp confirmed that Turkish fighter jets had carried out fresh sorties but that there were “no signs” of a Turkish ground offensive against Qandil. Turkish forces who had crossed the border from Turkey’s Hakkari and Sirnak provinces remained in the Harkurk region adjoining Qandil, one of the sources told Al-Monitor.