20 Turkish warplanes strike Sulaimani’s Penjwen district: Defense ministry

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region’s Penjwen’s rural areas came under heavy airstrikes on Tuesday morning after nearly two dozen Turkish airplanes struck positions the defense ministry said belonged to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Penjwen mayor Zana Abdul Rahman earlier Tuesday confirmed to Kurdistan 24 that the strikes had hit the villages of Kani Miran, Homara Senan, and Wirya Awa east of Sulaimani province’s Penjwen district, attributing the strikes to drones.

Later, the Turkish defense ministry announced that it had conducted the air raid with 20 warplanes, targeting 28 positions allegedly belonging to the PKK in the mountainous areas known as the Asos region.

The NATO member’s defense ministry directly supervised the air operations from the Air Force Operations Center in Turkey, the statement added.

Neither the mayor nor the ministry indicated any casualties as a result of the intense airstrikes.

The targeted areas are agricultural sites for residents of the villages, to which the ongoing Turkey-PKK clashes pose great humanitarian risks.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) regularly calls on the warring sides to take their fight away from its territories, in which civilians as well as security forces are under direct threat of the decades-old conflict.