Turkish air strikes and artillery have hit more than 200 Kurdish targets in the mountains of northern Iraq since Dec. 16, killing hundreds of insurgents, the military said Tuesday.

Up to 175 militants were killed Dec. 16 alone, the military said in a statement posted on its website. It said other hideouts were hit in a cross-border air strike Saturday, followed by artillery fire.

In Iraq, a Kurdish official said information from the insurgents cast doubt on Turkey's claims.

"These are exaggerated figures," said Mahmoud Uthman, a Kurdish leader and member of parliament. "Most of the villages [that were attacked] were abandoned."

Iraqi officials said the Dec. 16 operation — the first confirmed by Turkey since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 — violated Iraqi sovereignty. That operation was followed by an incursion by ground forces, who spotted a group of Kurdish insurgents preparing to cross into Turkey.

The Turkish military released photos and footage it said were shot from planes before and after the air assaults. Most of the pictures were too blurry to distinguish spots marked as militant facilities, but in some, purported camp areas and demolished buildings were visible.

The last confirmed offensive across the Turkish-Iraqi border came last Saturday, when Turkish airplanes entered Iraqi airspace and bombed suspected militant targets.

A spokesman for Iraqi Kurdistan's Peshmerga security forces said earlier that Turkish fighter jets also bombed Kurdish insurgent targets in northern Iraq on Sunday.

But a U.S. official in Ankara said Tuesday that there was no evidence of a Sunday air assault. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

In an earlier statement, the Turkish military said it was hard to determine precisely how many insurgents died in recent attacks but put the figure in the hundreds.

In a province inside Turkey near the Iraqi border, Turkish troops backed by helicopter gunships killed five Kurdish insurgents Tuesday, the military said in a separate statement, also posted on its website.

Officials in Iraq have claimed civilians were killed in the attacks, but the Turkish statement said any reports of civilian casualties were a fabrication and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said civilians were not targeted.