Ihsan Chalabi, mayor of Sidakan told Rudaw that an airstrike in Sidakan district’s Nawdarok village resulted in the killing of one person.
The victim is 43-year-old Peshmerga Sarwar Qadir, who was killed by the airstrike at around 6:30 pm on Thursday evening, while off-duty. His body was found on Friday morning. The body was now in the Soran Forensic Medicine department.
Chalabi said preliminary information indicates that a Turkish warplane conducted the airstrike on Sidakan.
Media affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) also blamed Turkey for the attack, while the Turkish defense ministry has yet to comment on the matter.
Turkey frequently bombards areas of the Kurdistan Region under the pretext of targeting the PKK. In February, Kamaran Osman, a member of the Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a human rights organization that monitors Turkey’s operation in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw that Ankara conducted 1,548 such attacks in 2023.
This is the second alleged Turkish strike in the Kurdistan region this week. On Wednesday, a suspected Turkish drone strike killed one person in Sulaimani province’s Mawat district.
On Thursday, the Turkish defense ministry announced that it will end its aerial military operations, dubbed Operation Claw-Lock, in the Kurdistan Region.
“The lock, in Claw-Lock, will be closed this summer,” Zeki Akturk, Press and Public Relations Advisor at the Turkish defense ministry told reporters on Thursday.
He added that “rapid operations” against the Kurdish group will continue in the Region.
Turkey’s Claw-Lock Operation is part of a series of military offensives that first launched in 2019 against the PKK in northern Duhok province to eradicate the group in its bases in the Kurdistan Region’s mountains. Turkish forces have built dozens of outposts within the Kurdistan Region’s borders during its operations.
Iraq’s National Security Council banned the PKK from operating in the country last month, following a high-level meeting between Turkish and Iraqi officials. The two sides discussed measures to be taken against the group, which Baghdad said poses a security threat to both countries.
In March, the PKK announced that it had downed 15 Turkish drones between February 2023 and March 2024, adding that it had acquired new missile systems to shoot them down, without providing details on the type and quantity of the acquisition.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month that Ankara is close to completing a zone that will “permanently resolve” the security issues along their border with the Kurdistan Region and Iraq by the summer.
Erdogan is expected to visit Iraq next week and border security is expected to be one of the topics of discussion.
.jpeg&w=3840&q=75)