ISTANBUL (Reuters) - At least nine civilians and 16 separatist fighters were killed as security forces try to root out Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, the army and the region's biggest parliamentary party said separately on Monday.
Security forces have imposed 24-hour curfews as part of efforts to drive out the PKK, which has declared autonomy and sealed off entire districts in some urban centers in the region.
Parts of Cizre and the Sur district of Diyarbakir, the region's largest city, have been under curfew since December.
Ten of the 16 militants killed were in Cizre and six were in Sur, the military said on its website. That brought the death toll in the two places to 749 since December, it said.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, speaking at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said the operations in Cizre may draw to a close in the next few days.
"It is obvious that (the PKK) is implementing methods to destabilize cities in Turkey. In this regard, Cizre is a critical town, situated so close to the border, exploitable for weapons and terrorists to cross," he said.
Fighting flared in July, wrecking a ceasefire and slow-moving peace talks aimed at ending the three-decade insurgency which has killed 40,000 people.
The Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), which has Kurdish origins and is the southeast's biggest party, named nine civilians who had been killed in Cizre since Friday, bringing the death toll to 127 civilians since December.
Davutoglu has dismissed claims that civilians have been targeted and also denied reports that several wounded people had died after spending days stranded in buildings in Cizre.
Authorities had sent ambulances to collect the wounded - mainly PKK members - but militants had stopped them, he said.
The HDP said late on Sunday its lawmakers had not heard from a group of 15 wounded people, who have been sheltering in a basement in Cizre's Cudi district along with seven dead bodies for more than a week.
It said nine more people had died in a fire in a different basement in the area and that they had also not heard from wounded people there for the last two days.
Turkey, the United States and European Union designate the PKK as a terrorist organization.