Turkish police killed six suspected Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants and lost three officers in an early morning raid on Monday in northwestern Yalova province, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced.
Yerlikaya said ISIL suspects opened fire when officers raided a house at 2 a.m. local time, leaving eight police officers and a neighborhood night guard wounded.
He said the six dead suspects were Turkish citizens and that five women and six children in the house were safely evacuated.
The operation reportedly lasted nearly eight hours and that special forces from nearby Bursa province were sent to reinforce local units.
Authorities closed five schools, cut electricity and gas supplies and restricted access to the area during the operation.
The clash came after an İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office investigation that ordered the detention of 137 suspected ISIL members over intelligence pointing to possible attacks during Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, with police taking 115 people into custody.
Turkey shares a 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria and has faced repeated ISIL attacks in the past decade, including a January 1, 2017, nightclub attack in İstanbul that killed 39 people.
Turkish state media have also reported recent arrests of senior ISIL suspects outside Turkey, including a capture at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that Turkish officials said was linked to planned suicide attacks.
With reporting by Agence France-Presse.