At least seven rockets hit the outskirts and areas near a military base housing Turkish forces in Nineveh province on Sunday night, with a few landing in a farmer’s potato field in Zilkan’s Girkal village.
“A very, very loud sound of rockets came, we ran upstairs. The children were here [in the potato field],” the village’s mayor Saeed Hassan told Rudaw’s Naif Ramadan.
Around six to seven workers were also in the field at the time but were not harmed by the strikes, which damaged some water pipes in the field.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Located in the southeast of Zilkan, rockets have landed in Girkal for the first time, despite the base being targeted several times in the past.
“We were watering [the potatoes] at 2:14 am, all the brothers were here. We were watering the area and then a rocket landed, this place turned to fire,” another eyewitness, Jamal Ahmed, said.
Home to Turkish personnel in Zilkan, the base is known as the Bashiqa base as it is just 10 kilometers away from the town of Bashiqa in Nineveh.
When asked about the possible motivation behind the attack, the mayor said, “there is a 20-kilometer distance between us and the Turkish base,” affirming that they have no ties to the base, and vice versa.
The base has been a target of over three dozen airstrikes since the beginning of the year.
Around 18 rockets were fired at the base in February in retaliation to a Turkish aerial bombardment in Shingal at the time.
Turkey-Iraq relations were strained in the wake of the deployment of some 150 Turkish soldiers to Iraq in December 2015. Turkish troops were deployed to the area on the pretext of training Iraqi and Kurdish forces in their fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).
The troops are still present in the area despite calls from Iraqi officials for them to leave.
