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| Iraq |
| Three Peshmerga wounded in Turkish bombardment near border |
| 2019-06-06 |
| [Rudaw] Three Peshmerga fighters were maimed, one of them critically, when ...Qatar's colony in Asia Minor.... launched Operation Claw last week targeting suspected Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) positions inside the Kurdistan Region of Iraq near its shared border with Turkey and Iran. Asqi Zubair, a resident of a nearby village in Sidakan, awoke in the early hours of Wednesday to the sound of bombing, which has become a daily occurrence. "The jets had bombed an orchard and a farm belonging to the Peshmerga fighters," Zubair told Rudaw via telephone. "The three Peshmerga, two of them brothers, rushed to the scene to the put out the fire that was engulfing their crops." Isa Lawa, a Peshmerga colonel, told Rudaw: "When they went to put out the fire... the jets come back and bomb the area again. One of the Peshmerga has lost a leg and the two others have sustained minor injuries." The incident took place around 5:30 a.m. in the village of Mergarash, Erbil province. "I don’t know if there were PKK fighters in the orchard when the jets bombed but this has become our fate since 2008 when the Turks started setting up bases," Zubair said. "The Thousands of villagers in this area are caught in the crossfire between the armed forces of Turkey and Iran and various Kurdish gangs. Livestock are also regularly killed, destroying livelihoods. Forests and farmland are also devastated each year in wildfires caused festivities and dronezaps. "Thousands of acres of woodlands, forestry, agricultural and pastoral lands and their vulnerable ecosystems were destroyed," environmental analyst Wim Zwijnenburg said in a 2018 report titled "Burning Borderlands: Open-Source Monitoring of Conflict-caused Wildfires in Iraq". "Though it’s difficult to identify the cause of each individual fire, a substantial amount of the fires identified were likely caused by military action." Family accuse Turkish military of killing Yezidi man near border [Rudaw] Relatives of a Yazidi man shot dead in the border area between Turkey and the Kurdistan Region in the early hours of Tuesday have accused the Turkish military of unlawful killing. Amin Salih, 20, and two of his friends were travelling from the Cham Mishko internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp in Zakho to an area called Rabanga on the Iraqi side of the river that delineates the border with Turkey. The three young Yezidis, originally from Shingal, had acquired a plot of farmland there. As they approached the plot on the Iraqi side at around 4am on Tuesday, they came under fire from the Turkish side. One bullet pierced the windscreen of their white KIA pickup. “The Turks were firing at us and hitting the vehicle,” Hussein Ali, one of the three Yazidi men, told Rudaw on Tuesday. “The bullet which went through the windscreen hit [Salih’s] temple.” The two surviving men hid in the vehicle for an hour as the shooting continued. Unable to escape to find help, their friend bled to death in his car seat. The young men have farmed this plot of land for two years. Soldiers manning a Turkish outpost across the river had regularly fired warning shots, Ali says. It is possible Salih and his friends were mistaken for smugglers, who use the secluded spot to move goods under the cover of darkness. Salih’s family says the men were there in the dark hours of the morning because it was Eid and they wanted to finish work early before visiting their Muslim neighbors. The Turkish military has not commented on the incident. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |