Kamaran Osman, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a human rights organization that monitors Turkey's operations in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw’s Soran Hussein that the Turkish army has attacked 1,548 times in the Kurdistan Region.
According to Osman Turkey launched 1,159 airstrikes with warplanes, conducted 228 drone attacks, and carried out 114 artillery shelling, in addition to being responsible for three shootings, and the explosion of two landmines.
He specified that the province that witnessed most Turkish attacks was Duhok which was struck 517 times, followed by Erbil province with 475 strikes, Sulaimani with 420 strikes, and Nineveh with 36 attacks.
According to CPT data, Ankara has killed at least 152 people and injured 228 since 2015.
Osman said that since 1990, about 850 civilians have been killed by Turkish and Iranian airstrikes, with Ankara being behind the majority of the strikes.
Turkey frequently bombards the northern mountainous areas of the Kurdistan Region under the pretext of targeting Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters.
On Tuesday, Turkish warplanes targeted the abandoned Kafia village in Akre district, hitting four villagers who were tending to their farms in the vicinity of the area and killing two, according to their families who spoke to Rudaw.
“The strike was carried out by a Turkish warplane,” Sarbast Sabri, mayor of Dinara subdistrict where Kafia is located, told Rudaw’s Hunar Rashid.
The strike comes amid an escalation of violence between Turkey and the PKK after the armed group killed 12 soldiers in the Kurdistan Region in late December, triggering an intensification of retaliatory attacks by Ankara on the PKK and its alleged offshoots in Syria.
At least seven Turkish soldiers have been confirmed dead in the Kurdistan Region since the beginning of the year, according to the Turkish defense ministry.
Civilians are often caught in the crossfire of the conflict between Turkey and the PKK. Many families have been forced to flee their homes in the Kurdistan Region's villages because of clashes, especially those in northern Duhok province near the border with Turkey, leaving entire villages empty. A Kurdistan Region parliamentary report published in 2020 said that the Turkey-PKK conflict has left over 500 villages empty across the Region.