The soldier was wounded in a mortar attack on a Turkish military base before later dying of his injuries in hospital, the ministry said.

Three Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants were “neutralized” in retaliation, it added. The Turkish military uses the term neutralized in reference to the killing, wounding, or capturing of enemy combatants.

In April, Turkey launched Operations Claw-Lightning and Thunderbolt, the latest in a series of cross-border incursions against the PKK in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

Involving both air and ground forces, the operations seek to disrupt the PKK’s activities in the mountainous border region and expand the presence of Turkish troops in the Iraqi Kurdish provinces of Duhok and Erbil.

Two Turkish soldiers were previously killed and another injured during clashes with the PKK on July 27.

Turkey and the PKK have been involved in an internal conflict since the 1980s. Clashes have increasingly shifted across the Iraqi border in recent years according to monitoring organization Crisis Group.

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