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Eight villages emptied amid Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq
[Rudaw] Eight villages close to northern Iraq’s border town of Zakho have been emptied out as locals flee under the roar of Ottoman Turkish Arclight airstrike
...KABOOM!...
s, Kurdish officials tell Rudaw.

The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
has deployed commando forces four kilometres deep into northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, causing residents of eight villages to flee, local authorities in Zakho have confirmed to Rudaw. The military offensive launched this week, dubbed Operation Claw-Tiger, involves a combined aerial and ground-based assault aimed at targeting suspected positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the region.

The villages are located in Batifa, a small subdistrict in the Sinat-Haftanin mountainous district near the city of Zakho, close to the Ottoman Turkish border. In Keshan, one of the villages now empty, residents have abandoned their properties, fearing the aerial bombardment.

"We have brought our family members here to Zakho. Around three to four bombs fell right behind our village on Tuesday night," Salim Khawaja, whose family makes a living on sheep, told Rudaw. "We could not take our sheep out for gazing."

Although farmers are not party to the conflict, they risk losing out on their livelihood, as their farmlands are their only source of income.

"We are around 15 families living in the village, Turkey's bombings continued through last night," Hashim Omer, a resident of Keshan village, told Rudaw on Wednesday. "We were forced to abandon our homes. Just some of them who have sheep have stayed. If the situation continues like it is now, they will leave as well."

An Iraqi border official in Zakho told Rudaw that they have already expressed their anger over Ottoman Turkish ground and air offensive in the region, claiming that Turkey has not coordinated with Iraq’s security forces.

"We were not informed of the attack," Diler Farzanda Zebari, commander of Border Force One, told Rudaw on Wednesday, adding the region has become a "prohibited zone" because of the presence of the PKK and Ottoman Turkish forces.

Over the past two years, 35 out of 75 villages in Batifa have seen their populations thin out and empty due to fighting in the region.
Posted by: trailing wife 2020-06-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=574741