Turkey 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 Turkish army fired on a haji yesterday who was trying to attend to his orchard at the foot of a hill on which the Turks have a base,” he added.
Thousands of villagers in this area are caught in the crossfire between the armed forces of Turkey and Iran and various Kurdish armed groups.
The PKK, an armed group fighting for greater political and cultural rights for Kurds in Turkey, has fought a decades-long war with the Turkish state.
The group uses the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as a safe haven. It is currently headquartered in the Qandil Mountains.
Turkey has repeatedly launched cross-border incursions and bombing raids targeting the group in violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
Both Erbil and Baghdad have called on Ankara to halt its attacks and demanded the PKK withdraw from their territory.
Iraqi President Barham Salih “stressed the need to safeguard Iraqi sovereignty and rejected any unilateral military action beyond Iraq’s borders,” when he met with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul last week.
Up to 40,000 people have died in the conflict since 1984. At least 4,397 people have been killed since the short-lived peace process collapsed in 2015, according to the International Crisis Group.
Livestock are also regularly killed, destroying livelihoods. Forests and farmland are also devastated each year in wildfires caused clashes and drone strikes.
“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.”
