Kurdistan
Photo submitted to Rudaw shows the house that was targetted by the unidentified drone on April 17, 2024. Photo: Submitted
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Two separate drone strikes targeted a village near the Mawat district of Sulaimani province, resulting in material damage, the district’s mayor announced on Wednesday.
“We were targeted twice in the Sharbazher area by drones,” Kamaran Hassan, Mayor of Mawat, which is part of the Sharbazher area, told Rudaw.
The first strike targeted a house in the Kurala village, according to Hassan, who noted that no one was in the house at the time of the attack.
Hassan said that in a separate strike, the Tazha and Shilana forests in Sharbazher area were targeted, resulting in no casualties, as was the case for the first strike.
Media affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) blamed Turkey for the attack, while the Turkish defense ministry has yet to comment on the matter.
Turkey frequently bombards areas of the Kurdistan Region under the pretext of targeting the PKK. In February, Kamaran Osman, a member of the Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a human rights organization that monitors Turkey’s operation in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw that Ankara conducted 1,548 such attacks in 2023.
Turkey has repeatedly warned the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which effectively controls the local governments in Sulaimani, about the PKK’s activities in the province, with Defense Minister Yasar Guler saying in September that his country is “continuously warning” Talabani about what he called “an increase in terrorist activities” in Sulaimani.
Last month, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said during a televised interview that the “cordial” relations between the PKK and the PUK “constitute a national security threat,” for Ankara.
Iraq’s National Security Council banned the PKK from operating in the country last month, following a high-level meeting between Turkish and Iraqi officials. The two sides discussed measures to be taken against the group, which Baghdad said poses a security threat to both countries.
In March, the PKK announced that it had downed 15 Turkish drones between February 2023 and March 2024, adding that it had acquired new missile systems to shoot down, without providing details on the type and quantity of the acquisition.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month that Ankara is close to completing a zone that will “permanently resolve” the security issues along their border with the Kurdistan Region and Iraq by the summer.
Erdogan is expected to visit Iraq next week and border security is expected to be one of the topics of discussion.
Updated at 6:29 pm
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