ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Sunday that a senior official with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was “neutralized” in an airstrike near the Makhmour refugee camp in northern Iraq.

In an attack on Saturday, senior PKK official and manager of the Makhmour camp Selman Bozkir was killed along with two additional individuals, according to Turkish and Iraqi security officials who did not elaborate.

The airstrike comes days after the Turkish leader warned of a coming operation on the camp, which he described as an “incubation center” for terrorism in a tweet on Sunday. Located about 180 kilometers (112 miles) south of the Turkish border, Ankara has long viewed the Makhmour camp of about 12,000 inhabitants as a safe haven for PKK militants and their sympathizers, many of whom are Kurdish citizens of Turkey who fled fighting in the 1990s.

The attack was one of Turkey’s deepest into Iraqi territory since it launched operations Claw-Lightning and Claw-Thunderbolt on April 23 to root out PKK militants along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Analysts tracking the ongoing conflict say the latest airstrike underlines Ankara’s drive to keep the pressure by all available means on Kurdish militants operating in the region.