Ten PKK combatants are slain when Turkey attacks northern Iraq.
The bombing of several locations" claimed the life of a
tenth PKK member and injured three more.Turkey claimed to have resumed
airstrikes on northern Iraq on Thursday, but Iraqi Kurdish authorities
confirmed that ten fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) had been
slain.In response to a suicide attack in Ankara on October 1 that injured two
police officers, Turkey has increased its cross-border airstrikes targeting
Kurdish sites in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria.
Ankara and its Western allies regard the PKK, which has been fighting Turkey for decades, as a"terrorist" organization. A section of the banned organization
claimed responsibility for that attack. In the autonomous
Kurdistan region of Iraq, nine PKK members lost their lives in a series of
airstrikes carried out by Turkish jets and drones in the Arbil province,
according to a statement from the Kurdish counterterrorism service.
"The bombing of several locations" belonging to the PKK in Dohuk province resulted in
the death of a tenth member and the injuries of three others, the statement
continued.
On Thursday,Turkey's defense ministry announced that airstrikes had been carried out on
targets in five northern Iraqi districts, claiming that "many terrorists
were neutralized.""The Wednesday strikes resulted in the successful
destruction of 19 targets, including terrorists' caverns, shelters, and depots,
as well as the neutralization of numerous terrorists," the statement read.
While it regularly launches air and ground offensives against the PKK and its locations in
northern Iraq, the Turkish military rarely discusses its operations there.
The Turkish parliament gave the military two additional years to begin cross-border
operations in Syria and Iraq earlier this month.
In order to aid the global war against the Islamic State organization, such activities were first
authorized in 2013 and have since been renewed yearly.
Turkey has established numerous military bases in Iraqi Kurdistan during the last 25 years
in an effort to counter the PKK, which also maintains outposts there.
For years, despite protests against violations of Iraqi sovereignty and harm to civilians, the
Kurdish authorities in Arbil and the federal government in Baghdad have been
accused of ignoring the Turkish bombardments in order to maintain their
strategic alliance with Ankara, a vital trading partner.
Nine individuals, mostly vacationers from southern Iraq, were killed in summer 2022 when
artillery munitions struck a park for pleasure in the Iraqi Kurdish border
community of Parakh.
Baghdad blamed Turkey for the attack, but Ankara blamed the PKK instead of accepting
responsibility. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to visit Iraq, but no specific date has been given by the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani in late July.