More titan 150 Kurdish rebels from the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have been killed in Turkish bombing raids carried out in northern Iraq this week, the Tlirkish army said Saturday.

But a PKK spokesman dismissed the figures as false, describing them as psychological warfare.

"According to initial estimates, this operation allowed us to neutralise more than 150 terrorists," said a statement on the Turkish armywebsite.

Several senior PKK command ers may have been among the dead, the statement said, adding that the raids caused "panic among (PKK) members."

Jhe raids in the mountainous Qandil region, which began late Thursday and continued into the night, hit 43 targets including shelters and a PKK communications centre, which were all destroyed, the armysaid.

PKK spokesman Ahmed Danis dismissed the death toll issued by the Turkish army and previous figures

published in theTUrkish media.

He told AFP that six of their fighters had been killed during the attack overnight Friday in the Qandil mountains.

"The Turkish government is indulging in psychological warfare against the people of Kurdistan and PKK," he said.

"The TUrkish media is exaggerating the number of attacks and the number of people killed and wounded," he added.

The Qandil mountains straddle Iran, Iraq andTUrkey and have long been a separatist haven.

Turkish warplanes have been bombing PKK positions in northern Iraq on and off since midDecember. In February, the army conducted a week-long ground offensive against rebel hideouts in the region, where Ankara estimates more than2,000 militants take refuge.

Turkey's parliament authorized cross-border military action against the rebels for a period of one year in October, paving the way for the ground offensive, which was preceded by five bombing raids on PKK targets in northern Iraq.