“Nine PKK fighters were killed in a series of strikes carried out by Turkish warplanes and drones on several positions in Sidakan district of Erbil province last night,” the Erbil-based Directorate General of Counter Terrorism (CTD), also known as Kurdistan CT, said in a statement on Facebook.
It added that an additional PKK fighter was killed and three others wounded as Turkish warplanes bombarded Duhok province’s Shiladze and Deraluk subdistricts.
The PKK is a Kurdish group that has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey for decades and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, who has launched successive operations both in the Kurdistan Region and Syria to target the group and other forces Turkey claims to be its offshoots.
Kurdistan CT is unofficially linked to the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) - which has had rocky relations with the PKK for decades. There have been clashes between KDP-affiliated Peshmerga forces and PKK fighters in bordering areas in recent years over land control.
Iraqi officials have repeatedly accused Ankara of violating Iraqi sovereignty by maintaining an “illegal” presence in the Kurdistan Region on the grounds of fighting the PKK, while also accusing the Kurdish group of using its territory to launch cross-border attacks against Turkey.
Since 2019, Turkey has carried out several operations against the PKK in Kurdistan Region’s northern Duhok province. Operation Claw was launched in 2019 in Khakurk. This was followed by Claw-Tiger in June 2020. The third offensive was a ground and air cross-border operation, dubbed Claw-Lightning and Claw-Thunderbolt, launched in April 2021.
In April of last year, Turkey launched Operation Claw-Lock with the goal of targeting PKK positions in Metina, Zap, Avashin, and Basyan areas in northern Duhok province to remove the group from the border areas and cut off its access to mainland Turkey.
More than 500 villages have been emptied in the Kurdistan Region over three decades of the Turkey-PKK conflict.