Kurdistan
Flames rising from the mosque at the Makhmour refugee camp on October 7, 2023. Photo: Submitted.
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Three people were reportedly injured in a suspected Turkish drone attack on Makhmour refugee camp on Saturday.
Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a human rights organization that monitors Turkey's operations in the Kurdistan Region, said on X (formerly known as Twitter) that Turkish forces bombed a mosque inside the refugee camp and injured a woman and two children.
Makhmour Camp hosts over 12,000 Kurdish refugees from southeast Turkey. The majority of the residents came from villages depopulated during Turkey’s conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The site is closed to security forces and journalists and no one was permitted to enter after the attack on Saturday, according to Rudaw’s reporter on the ground, Mustafa Goran.
The camp is located in a security vacuum in an area disputed between Baghdad and Erbil and has several times been hit by Turkish air and drone strikes targeting alleged PKK members. Civilians have been killed in the strikes. Ankara believes the PKK uses Makhmour Camp as a training ground with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2021 calling it an “incubation center for terrorism.”
Turkish forces have carried out a string of strikes on alleged PKK positions in retaliation for an attack last week in front of the interior ministry’s general security directorate in Ankara. The military arm of the PKK claimed responsibility, saying it was an “act of legitimate defense” against Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan claimed on Wednesday that the perpetrators of the Ankara attack entered Turkey from Syria. “Following the latest incident, as a result of the work of our intelligence and security units, we have found out that the two terrorists came from Syria and were trained there,” said the minister during a press conference in Ankara.
On Friday, his ministry announced “comprehensive operations” against PKK targets in Iraq and Syria.
The PKK is an armed group struggling for the increased rights of Kurds in Turkey but is proscribed as a terrorist organization by Ankara. It has bases in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Turkey considers Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria to be offshoots of the group.
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