ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Inzar Adam mourned the death of a family member, his cousin, in a Turkish airstrike almost three years ago. History tragically repeated itself when Turkey bombed two alleged positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Duhok province on Friday, killing his brother and at least three other civilians.
Mukhlis Adam, Azad Mahdi, and Deman Omar lived in Duhok’s Shiladze sub-district. They took what was supposed to be a leisurely post-work trip to Shiladze’s nearby mountains, where they were stopped by PKK fighters at a checkpoint.
A Turkish air force strike hit the checkpoint, killing the three friends and the two PKK fighters manning the post, Mukhlis’ brother Inzar told Rudaw English via telephone late on Friday.
“He went to work in the morning and finished at around 11 am. He was a labourer ... Then they [he and two other friends who died] went to Sidan village for leisure. We called them multiple times, but they didn’t pick up,” said Inzar.
They were informed at 1 pm that Mukhlis had been killed in a Turkish airstrike. Inzar rushed to the area, where he initially found the dead bodies of his brother and one of his friends. He later returned to find the dead body of the other friend, “whose body had been thrown afar by the explosion.”
While collecting the bodies of his brother and his companions, Inzar said he saw PKK fighters arrive at the scene to retrieve their two dead colleagues.
Milat Rekani, who recorded footage of the incident, told Rudaw English that people heard the news of the deaths from social media.
The footage he took shows people flocking to the scene near the village of Sidan, Balanda Valley, on foot and by car. The air at the scene is filled with smoke; at least one pick-up truck can be seen lying in ruin.
“When I reached the scene, I found out that two [bombs] hit the area - one hit a [pickup] vehicle and the other near it. However, no one was in the vehicle. There was a mobile phone in the vehicle, and it belonged to one of the martyrs,” Rekani told Rudaw English via Messenger, using martyr to refer to a killed civilian.
The dead bodies were so burned that they were "beyond recognition", Rekani said.
“I heard the brother of one of the martyrs screaming, ‘Azad has been martyred!’ Mukhlis’ brother recognized him because of his cigarette packet and mobile phone," he said.
"I saw two other dead bodies which belonged to the PKK,” Rekani recounted, adding that the dead bodies of the PKK fighters were “charred.”
The fourth civilian casualty in Friday’s air campaign was Amin Salih, from the nearby Kani Masi area. The 23-year-old had been married for just seven months when he was killed on Friday morning, according to Rudaw reporter Hunar Rasheed.
Turkey has yet to acknowledge the deaths of the four civilians. Its defense ministry said in a tweet on Friday afternoon that they had “neutralized” three members of the PKK in the Kurdistan Region.
Operations Claw-Eagle and Claw-Tiger, Turkey’s current air and ground missions respectively, are just another chapter in the tome of Turkish operations in the Kurdistan Region, where the PKK are headquartered. The ever-looming threat of violence has seen 85 of Shiladze’s 91 villages vacated. In the last three years alone, 24 civilians in the subdistrict have been killed by Turkish airstrikes, Shiladze mayor Warshin Salman told Rudaw.
A Turkish military base in Shiladze cements its fate as a focal point in PKK-Turkey clashes. The base was the site of heated protests in early 2019, when locals accused Turkey of launching airstrikes that killed several civilians in the area.
On Thursday, a shepherd was killed by Turkish airstrikes in Erbil province’s Sidakan district, near the Kurdistan Region’s border with Iran.
The PKK has fought for the cultural and political rights of Kurds in Turkey; Ankara and its Western allies have designated it a terrorist organization. The two sides have clashed for decades, both inside Turkey and on the country’s borders with Iraq.
In the aftermath of the strike on Shiladze, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) released a statement calling on Turkey to “respect” its sovereignty, while calling at the same time for the PKK to leave the Region.
“We are monitoring the incidents today and the previous days on the border areas with concern. They [the incidents] have caused casualties and material losses to the civilians and villagers of these areas,” read a statement from KRG spokesperson Jutiar Adil.
