HDP condemns Turkish attack on Shingal, calls it attack on Ezidis

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition on Thursday condemned an airstrike coordinated by the country’s air force and intelligence on the town of Sinjar (Shingal) that killed a prominent Yezidi (Ezidi) Kurdish rebel leader of the PKK, Ismail Ozden codenamed Mam Zeki Shingali.

“The attack carried out by Turkish warplanes against Sinjar on Aug. 25 is an attack against Yezidi society. We condemn the attack against Sinjar in the strongest possible manner,” the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in an English language statement whose Turkish version did not mention a condemnation.

Ezidis, an ethnoreligious Kurdish group, were the target of a genocidal campaign by the Islamic State (IS) that killed thousands of men and sexually enslaved thousands of other women and girls during its August 2014 onslaught on Shingal.

When the Turkish airstrikes hit his convoy that killed four other fighters, 66-year-old Shingali was returning from a commemoration ceremony for some 800 people who IS massacred in the Kocho village four years ago.

Shingali was a leader in PKK’s top civilian council, the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK), and was born in the Kurdish province of Batman in Turkey.

His fighters along with Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga forces were instrumental in liberating Shingal from Islamist militants in a campaign supported by the US-led Coalition in 2016.

The HDP said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration continued to engage in a “policy of war that led to today’s [financial] crisis,” referring to a meltdown in the Turkish lira’s value and concerns of a broader economic crisis amid a deep diplomatic spat with the US over the detention of Americans.

The second-largest opposition bloc added that Turkey had consolidated an anti-Kurdish alliance with regional states, including Iraq whose Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a day earlier of the attack visited Erdogan in Ankara.

The Turkish President’s spokesperson, Ibrahim Kalin, said the air assault on Shingal “could be considered in the framework” Abadi and Erdogan had agreed on regarding the country’s decades-long conflict with the PKK.

“This war policy is the main reason behind crisis and chaos,” the Turkish language version of HDP’s statement read, warning against any similar attack on Makhmour, a town 40 miles southwest of the Kurdistan Region capital Erbil that hosts a camp for some 12,000 Kurdish refugees who fled Turkish persecution in the early 1990s.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany