TURKEY placed two more mainly Kurdish cities under military siege yesterday in its ongoing crackdown on Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerillas.

In Yuksekova, which is part of Hakkari province, near Iran and Iraq, a curfew came into effect at 8pm local time.

The provincial governor announced that entering or leaving the town of some 70,000 residents would also be banned.

And Nusaybin, in Mardin province — just across the border from the Syrian town of Qamishli, which is held by Kurdish YPG militia forces — was locked down at midnight.

Security forces have been waging an increasingly brutal campaign against the PKK in Turkey’s majority-Kurdish south-east since a two-year ceasefire broke down last July.

The government claims to have killed hundreds of guerillas, but hundreds of civilians have died at the hands of Turkish troops.

On Saturday the Turkish air force bombed PKK positions in northern Iraq, claiming to have killed at least 67.

Last week the army declared its three-month assault on the historic Sur district of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the country’s mostly Kurdish south-east, successfully complete, but the curfew remained in place in most of the area.

Russia Today TV reported from Sur at the weekend that bodies had been found riddled with bullet wounds — as if troops had continued to shoot the dead and wounded — and left to be eaten by dogs.

Reporters said that imams at the city’s mosques had been ordered to deliver pro-government sermons.

Fighting broke out again after the PKK accused police of collusion in the horrific Islamic State (Isis) suicide bombing of socialist youth union volunteers in Suruc which killed 33 people last July.

The young victims were about set off to help rebuild the northern Syrian city of Kobane, devastated by months of Isis attacks.

Turkish journalists have been persecuted for exposing the government’s covert aid to Isis and other extremists in Syria.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday that his government has intelligence that Turkish troops are dug in several hundred yards inside Syrian territory.

He said Ankara’s “creeping expansion” is part of its claims to a “sovereign right” to prevent the YPG from linking up its two areas of control at the expense of Isis and the Nusra Front.