PKK denies responsibility for blazes in Erbil, Duhok, Kirkuk

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - An umbrella group which includes the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) denied the party was behind recent major fires in Erbil, Duhok and Kirkuk provinces, calling on Baghdad to reveal the “real perpetrators.”

“We reject the attempts to attribute responsibility to our movement for these attacks, which have no connection with reality,” a statement from the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) read, while blaming the Turkish intelligence agency (MIT) and a local intelligence agency for the blazes. 

The KCK’s foreign affairs committee said in a statement on Monday that the Iraqi interior ministry’s previous claim that the PKK was behind several huge and deadly blazes in Erbil, Duhok and Kirkuk “has nothing to do with reality,” labeling it “manipulation.”

Earlier in the day, a joint presser by the Iraqi and Kurdish interior ministries in Baghdad to reveal the results of a bilateral investigation labeled the PKK as the perpetrators of the fires, announcing that three suspects have been arrested in connection with the incidents and have confessed to being PKK members.

Two of the three arrested perpetrators who were “recruited” by the Kurdish group are members of the Peshmerga’s Unit 70 forces, affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), as well as the Sulaimani-based Counter-Terrorism Group (CTG), said Hemin Mirany, chief of staff to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) interior ministry. 

“The sponsoring and executing party of this topic is the PKK, which is a banned organization,” said Miqdad Miri, spokesperson for Iraq’s interior ministry. 

In April, Erbil Governor Omed Khoshnaw said that authorities had suspected arson after the city’s famous Langa bazaar caught fire twice in less than two months. Also in April, a massive fire swept through central Duhok’s Chale bazaar, burning over 300 shops. A month later, shopkeepers in Kirkuk’s Ottoman-era Qaysari bazaar said they were suspicious about the source of the fire because it broke out in different areas of the bazaar at the same time. 

"We call on the Iraqi state and the Ministry of Interior to act more responsibly… reveal the real perpetrators,” the KCK said in its statement.

The PKK and Turkish state have been locked in a decades-long military conflict, resulting in the death of roughly 40,000 people, including civilians. The group operates across the Iraqi-Turkish-Syrian borders, and recently, officials in Baghdad have cited Iraqi sovereignty, calling for the PKK’s expulsion.