Turkish armored vehicle kills two sleeping siblings

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan Region) – An armored Turkish police vehicle on Wednesday killed two sleeping brothers in the Kurdish province of Sirnak when it entered their house at midnight breaking down the walls.

The incident whose cause remained unknown happened around 11:50 p.m. local time in Sirnak’s Silopi district near the border with the Kurdistan Region.

Privately-owned Dogan news agency said the slain siblings Muhammet and Furkan were 7 and 6-years-old respectively.

After the incident, the police officers driving the tank ran away from the house belonging to the brothers’ father Mesut Yildirim.

The home was left in rubbles of concrete as the officers abandoned their vehicle after fleeing, said the agency.

Neighbors claimed the police officers who drove their tank all the way to the other side of the room were drunk.

The officers were also in charge of guarding for the local branch of the Turkish far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

Later, authorities dispatched a large unit of riot police to the neighborhood.

The provincial prosecutor’s office launched an investigation Thursday as there was no comment by the Ankara-appointed governor.

Muhammet and Furkan’s family buried them in the district cemetery after repatriating their bodies from a hospital morgue in Silopi.

Silopi was the scene of a months-long fight between the Turkish government forces and affiliates of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) last year.

Heavily militarized even after fierce clashes and a round-the-clock curfew between December 2015-April 2016, random violence continues to claim lives in Silopi, including those of civilians.

In a similar incident elsewhere in October 2016, a Turkish police officer deployed in the Gever (Yuksekova) district of the neighboring Hakkari Province shot and killed four civilians and heavily wounded three others in broad daylight.

A reignited phase of the four-decades-long Turkey-PKK conflict since mid-2015 killed at least 2,000 people, according to a United Nations report released in March.

Of those, 800 were members of the Turkish forces, and approximately 1,200 were Kurdish residents, “of which an unspecified number may have been involved in violent or non-violent actions against the State.”

Among the civilian casualties were some 200 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), men, women, and children trapped in a basement in the Cizre district which government forces shelled in February 2016 burning and killing all inside.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany