Turkey strikes U.S.-backed Kurdish troops in Iraq, Syria
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish warplanes carried out air strikes on Tuesday against suspected Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq and in northeastern Syria, the military said, in a bid to prevent militants from smuggling fighters and weapons into Turkey.
The attack killed at least 18 U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish troops, according to a monitoring group, as well as five members of the Iraqi Kurdish militia known as the peshmerga and drew swift condemnation from Baghdad.
Syrian Kurdish forces said the strikes hit a media center, a local radio station, a communication headquarters and some military posts, killing an undetermined number of fighters in Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh province. The Britainbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian war, also reported the strikes on the media and military targets in Karachok.
According to the rights group, the air strikes killed 18 members of the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units. The rights group had earlier said only three were killed. Kurdish officials were not immediately available for comment.
Ankara says members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, are finding sanctuaries in neighboring Iraq and Syria, among those countries’ own Kurdish minorities.
A Turkish military statement said the predawn strikes hit targets on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq and also in a mountainous region in Syria. It said the operations were conducted to prevent infiltration of Kurdish rebels, weapons, ammunition and explosives from those areas into Turkey.
A Turkish security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with Turkish government protocol, said the air strikes are believed to have killed around 200 PKK militants, including some senior commanders. The claim could not be independently confirmed.
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry denounced the strikes as a “violation against Iraq’s sovereignty” and called on the international community to put an end to such “interferences” by Turkey.
Although Turkey regularly carries out air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq, this was the first time it has struck the Sinjar region. Turkey has long claimed that the area was becoming a hotbed for PKK rebels.
Last year, Turkey sent troops into Syria to back Syrian opposition fighters in the battle against the Islamic State group and also to curb what it perceives as the territorial expansion of U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces, which it claims are affiliated with the PKK. The Kurdish group, which has led an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984, is considered a terror organization by Turkey and its allies.