Turkish airstrike kills father and son in Kurdistan Region village
The most recent of a recent wave of Turkish airstrikes targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province on Saturday morning killed two civilians from the same family, a father and his adult son, and wounded one in the village of Hetuta on the outskirts of Amedi district.
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The most recent of a recent wave of Turkish airstrikes targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province late on Saturday morning killed two civilians from the same family, a father and his adult son, and wounded one in the village of Hetuta on the outskirts of Amedi district.
Sources told Kurdistan 24 that the two who perished in the attack are 60-year-old Jalal Nuradin and his 32-year-old son Ahmed, whose bodies were retrieved from the scene by other family members.
According to information gathered by Kurdistan 24, over the past four years, Turkish bombardment has killed 23 civilians in and around Amedi.
The PKK is engaged in a decades-long insurgency against Turkey over Kurdish rights and self-rule in a conflict that has resulted in the death of over 40,000 people on both sides. Turkish military operations inside the Kurdistan Region's Qandil Mountains and other sprawling areas near the borders of Turkey and Iran have become commonplace since the peace process between the PKK and Ankara collapsed in 2015.
A recent analysis by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) concluded that 77 percent of all engagements between Ankara and the armed group have “taken place in Iraq,” referring mostly to the autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Read More: Most Turkey-PKK engagements in 2020 took place in Kurdistan Region, conflict watchdog reports
Ankara, along with Washington, the EU, and NATO, designates the PKK as a terrorist organization. The group is thought to have fighters near hundreds of villages inside the Kurdistan Region, mainly in the mountainous areas near the Turkish and Iranian borders.
Turkey has regularly attacked areas inside the Kurdistan Region over the past decade but operations this year have intensified and widened in terms of scope and territory covered. In some areas, Turkish forces have mobilized as far as 30 kilometres deep inside the autonomous region’s border.
In April, the Iraqi foreign minister summoned the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad and delivered him a memorandum of protest against airstrikes Ankara conducted earlier that month against alleged PKK positions in the Kurdistan Region and a refugee camp in the disputed city of Makhmour.
Read More: Baghdad summons Turkish ambassador over airstrikes within Iraqi airspace
As civilians, agriculture, trade, and the local environment continue to suffer from the clashes, residents and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials have repeatedly asked the PKK and the Turkish government to take their fight elsewhere.
Editing by John J. Catherine