Iranian soldiers kill Kurdish youth on Turkey border
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – Iranian border guards on Wednesday night shot dead a young man near the border in Turkey’s southeast Kurdish province of Hakkari.
Kamuran Firat, 24, was standing on the Turkish side of a water stream that defines the Turkey-Iran border near the village of Kendalok (Agaclik) in Hakkari’s Gever (Yuksekova) district when Iranian soldiers shot him.
A bullet hit Firat in the back, heavily wounding him while he was out to bring back his family’s livestock, the unnamed villagers said.
Kurdistan 24’s Turkish language service reported that Firat’s villagers could confirm he had not trespassed the border that separates the Kurdish community in Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province from that in Turkey’s Hakkari.
Shortly after the incident, they took Firat to a local hospital in central Gever, but he succumbed to his wound and died despite medical intervention.
A Turkish prosecutor in Hakkari launched an investigation into the incident as medics performed an autopsy in the hospital.
There was no comment by Turkey’s Foreign Ministry on the killing of one of its citizens by Iranian soldiers at the time of publishing this report.
IRAN-TURKEY BORDER
The mountainous Iran-Turkey border that stretches from the Kurdistan Region in the south to Armenia in the north is one of the oldest in the world and has stayed largely the same since the early 16th-century.
It saw a slight change for the first time in over 400 years when the two nations agreed on a territorial exchange at the beginning of the 1930s to help a young Turkish state crush the short-lived Republic of Ararat declared by the Kurds.
The 16th-century national Kurdish poet Ahmadi Khani lamented the separation of his people as well as their subjugation by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the Persians who were often fighting on Kurdish lands.
The modern border has three commercial crossings, yet smuggling is rife between the two sides which in turn leads to scores of civilian killings both by the Iranian and Turkish armies.
Similar killings of Kurdish border courier (Kulbar) happen a lot more toward the south on the border between the Kurdistan Region and Iran.
The porous frontier also serves Kurdish rebels fighting the two militaries for larger political and cultural rights for the Kurds on both sides.
In May, Turkish authorities approved a plan for the construction of a wall along the country’s border with Iran to keep Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members at bay.
Iranian officials stated they did not object to Turkey’s plan for a wall, adding they only needed coordination.
Editing by Ava Homa and Karzan Sulaivany