Saturday, June 5, 2021

Turkish airstrike kills at least 3 in camp holding Kurdish refugees inside Iraq | Al Arabiya English

Turkish airstrike kills at least 3 in camp holding Kurdish refugees inside Iraq

A Turkish airstrike killed at least three people and injured others on Saturday at a camp for displaced people in northern Iraq, said Rashad Kelani, a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party official.

The strike on the camp housing thousands of Kurdish refugees from Turkey took place three days after Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan warned Iraq that Turkey would “clean up” a refugee camp which it says provides a haven for Kurdish militants.

An Iraqi security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed an airstrike had killed and injured people in the camp but did not give details...reuters

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  •   A Turkish airstrike has reportedly hit a refugee camp in Iraq housing Kurdish refugees from Turkey, media reports say, with Kurdish sources claiming three people were killed. Ankara called the camp “a terrorist breeding ground.”


“It was an airstrike and took place near Makhmour refugee camp. According to confirmed information, three people have died,” Sirwan Barzani, a commander of Kurdish Peshmerga military forces in northern Iraq, told the local Rudaw news agency.

The strike targeted a “kindergarten near a school" in the UN-supported camp, local MP and the deputy head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party’s office in the city of Erbil, Rashad Galali, told AFP. He claimed that “three civilians were killed and two wounded.”

A video published by Rudaw on social media shows plumes of grey smoke over what appears to be the camp. The facility houses more than 12,000 Kurds that fled Turkey back in the 1990s. It is located in Iraq in an area disputed by Baghdad and the government of the autonomous Kurdistan Region in the north....rt

4 comments :

  1. 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.

    The 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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peshmerga – 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.”

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Five 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.

      The 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."

      Delete

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