Three civilians were killed Saturday in a Turkish drone attack on a refugee camp in northern Iraq in an area Turkish President recently threatened to “clean up”, a Kurdish lawmaker said.
Rashad Galali, a Kurdish MP from Makhmur, told AFP the strike targeted “a kindergarten near a school” in the UN-supported camp that houses Kurdish refugees from Turkey.
“Three civilians were killed and two wounded,” he said.
Earlier this week Erdogan compared Makhmur to the Mount Qandil region along Iraq’s eastern frontier, where Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has rear bases.
“The issue of Makhmur is as important to us as Qandil... because Makhmur has become the incubator of Qandil... and if we don’t intervene the incubator will continue producing (terrorists),” he said.
“If the United Nations does not clean up this district, we will take care of it in our capacity as a UN member state,” Erdogan warned.
Turkish troops have maintained a network of bases in northern Iraq since the mid-1990s on the basis of security agreements struck with the now-ousted regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.
The PKK has waged a rebellion in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984 that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
The PKK maintains rear bases in northern Iraq, from where they train their fighters and launch attacks on Turkey which has hit back with air attacks and the occasional ground incursion into Iraq.
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In a separate incident on Saturday, five Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were killed and four wounded in an ambush by the PKK in northern Iraq, the ministry of Peshmerga said in a statement early on Saturday.
ReplyDeleteThe clashes took place on Matina mountain in the town of Amedi in the northern Kurdistan Region, the statement said.
The PKK did not immediately comment.
Turkey responds to the PKK attacks with airstrikes and occasional ground operations. It is also not the first time it targeted the Makhmour camp, according to Rudaw. Ankara is currently conducting two operations against the PKK in the Duhok province of the Iraqi autonomous Kurdistan Region.
ReplyDeletePeshmerga – the military force in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan, which is off limits to the Iraqi troops – has also clashed with the PKK. Hours before the Turkish strike on the camp, five Peshmerga fighters were killed in a fight against the PKK militants, a deputy minister for Peshmerga affairs in the autonomous regional government, Serbast Lazkin, has said. The PKK has blamed the clash on the Peshmerga, accusing it of having entered the territory the group controls and calling its action a “stab in the back.”
ReplyDeleteFive Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga troops were killed Saturday in a clash with fighters of Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a senior Iraqi Kurdish official said.
DeleteThe PKK maintains rear-bases in northern Iraq which have come under renewed assault by Turkish forces since April.
Two peshmerga troops were also wounded in Saturday's clash in the Mount Matin district of Dohuk province, said Serbast Lazkin, deputy minister for peshmerga affairs in Iraqi Kurdistan's autonomous regional government.
The People's Defence Forces (HPG), the armed wing of the PKK, accused the peshmerga of entering "a conflict zone in Matin" between it and Turkey "which wants to occupy Iraqi Kurdistan".
"These peshmerga movements are a stab in the back for the PKK and we refuse their entry into an area under our control," it said in a statement.
The PKK's pan-Kurdish agenda has often put it at odds with Iraq's autonomous Kurdish government, which has sought to maintain good relations with Ankara.
The peshmerga affairs ministry has called on "everyone to respect the borders of Kurdistan and to refrain from endangering its security and stability."