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Turks rallied in Istanbul on Tuesday, protesting deadly attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party.Credit Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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ISTANBUL — Turkish ground troops entered northern Iraq on Tuesday, seeking to capture Kurdish rebels who had crossed the border after a rebel attack in Turkey over the weekend killed 16 soldiers, a government official in Turkey said.

Demonstrators angry over that attack, and a bombing that killed 14 police officers on Tuesday in eastern Turkey, filled streets in Istanbul and elsewhere. Furious crowds attacked newspapers and the offices of a pro-Kurdish political party, the Reuters news agency reported, prompting Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to appeal for calm.

“I invite all my citizens with hearts full of love for the country to calm, embrace one another, and to have confidence in the state,” he said Tuesday on Twitter.

The tensions escalated as the military pursued militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., the government official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with protocol.

The operation’s size was not immediately clear, but the Dogan news agency, citing military sources, said two battalions had entered northern Iraq.

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On Monday, Turkish warplanes struck Kurdish insurgent targets in northern Iraq and killed dozens of rebels.

P.K.K. rebels were believed to be behind a roadside bombing in Igdir Province that killed 14 police officers on Tuesday, the semiofficial Anadolu Agency reported. Several other police officers were wounded in the assault.

In a separate attack on Tuesday, rocket-propelled grenades wounded at least four police officers in Cizre, a southeastern town, the local news media reported.

Violence in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern part of Turkey has escalated since the insurgents killed at least 16 soldiers on Sunday, the deadliest attack since the collapse of a two-year cease-fire in July.

The Kurdish group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, has been attacking Turkish security officials almost daily since the breakdown of the fragile peace process.

Turkish officials say the group has killed at least 100 members of the security forces since July.

After the attack on Sunday, Mr. Davutoglu vowed to eradicate the fighters from their mountain strongholds in Turkey and northern Iraq. “These terrorists must be wiped out from the mountains; whatever happens, they must be wiped out,” he said Monday in the capital, Ankara.

“The mountains of this country must not be handed over to terrorists,” he added. “Every effort will be undertaken.”

The Turkish military then struck 20 Kurdish targets late Monday in northern Iraq, killing at least 35 fighters, Anadolu reported.

As the unrest spread to the streets on Monday and Tuesday, nationalist mobs attacked dozens of buildings belonging to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party. On Tuesday night, a crowd attacked its headquarters in Ankara as well, the party said.

Thousands of people took to the streets across Turkey to protest the attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and call for peace.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party won representation in Parliament for the first time in a June 7 election by passing a 10 percent threshold, a factor in the governing Justice and Development Party’s loss of its parliamentary majority for the first time in more than a decade.

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