Most Turkish Troops Said to Be Out of Iraq : Mideast: Ankara’s army says it killed 555 Kurdish militants and lost 61 soldiers.

ISTANBUL, Turkey —  Most Turkish troops have withdrawn from northern Iraq after a six-week offensive against Kurdish rebels, officials said Thursday. But unabated Kurdish-related violence elsewhere showed that this nation’s Kurdish problem is far from solved--at home or abroad.

Defense Minister Mehmet Golhan said almost all of the 35,000 Turkish soldiers had been pulled back, excluding those still guarding Turkey’s mountainous border.

Deputy Prime Minister Hikmet Cetin said this meant that some troops remain inside northern Iraq.

The offensive was “one of the most successful campaigns in Turkish history,” Prime Minister Tansu Ciller said Wednesday, emphasizing that she would send troops back, if necessary, to root out guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The Turkish military said “Operation Steel,” the biggest of several anti-rebel forays into northern Iraq in recent years, had cost Turkey $66 million. The army said it killed 555 Kurdish militants, with a loss of 61 government soldiers.

But the PKK has sought to portray the Turkish withdrawal as a defeat and asserts that more than 1,000 soldiers died, a claim dismissed by Western diplomats, who also believe there were few confirmed Iraqi Kurdish civilian casualties.

Turkish attacks did, however, cause considerable fear and disruption for those living near the northern border of the “safe haven” in northern Iraq, where 3.5 million Iraqi Kurds have been protected from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by a U.S.-led allied force since the end of the Persian Gulf War.

As for Operation Steel, it brought no major battles. Even Turkish officials still estimate Turkish Kurd guerrilla forces to number almost 10,000; more than 2,000 rebels are still believed to be deep in northern Iraq and in some cases may have returned to areas vacated by Turkish troops.

To keep them at arm’s length, Turkey is trying to negotiate a new border-security arrangement with the two main Iraqi Kurdish groups.

The two factions have fought bitterly in recent months. Masoud Barzani’s group has voiced a readiness to cooperate in talks in the Turkish capital this week. But in statements in northern Iraq, his rival, Jalal Talabani, has said he considers the PKK a political group that he will only deal with by diplomatic means.

*

Meanwhile, bloody clashes between the army and the PKK have continued inside Turkey and northern Iraq. So far, almost 15,000 people have been killed since 1984, when the Syria-based Marxist rebels launched their struggle for ill-defined goals, including their most ambitious--a Kurdish state to unite the 20 million Kurds split between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Violence is no longer confined to southeast Turkey, home to about half of this country’s 12 million Kurds, who constitute one-fifth of the nation’s 60 million people.

Istanbul was shocked when three young women workers died on Thursday of asphyxiation after their street of shops was set ablaze by fire bombs thrown by a dozen people waving PKK flags, Turkish television reported.

In neighboring Greece on Wednesday, 400 people waving Kurdish rebel flags and portraits of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan stoned a bus carrying Yildirim Aktuna, a Turkish minister and government spokesman; one protester beat Aktuna to the ground, leaving him scratched and bruised.

Such scenes, replayed at length on Turkish television, have stoked a sense of isolation and angry nationalism among Turks.

At the same time, Turkey’s northern Iraq incursion has received much European criticism from those who have denounced Ankara’s repressive policies on Kurdish rights.

Sensing a diplomatic crisis that could derail Turkey’s ambitions for a free-trade agreement with the European Union by early next year, the government has summoned 17 of its European envoys home for consultations this weekend.

The United States has been the most understanding of Turkey’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies about Ankara’s actions in northern Iraq.

But the Ciller government also has sought to show its independence from Washington, snubbing President Clinton’s call for U.S. allies to impose a trade embargo against Iran over its alleged support of terrorist activity.

Turkey has underlined its independence by going ahead with a three-day visit, which ended Thursday, by Iranian Oil Minister Zolam Aqazadeh.