Error occured during this request! Please try again later.
Kurdistan
Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar visited a Turkish base in the Kurdistan Region on May 1, 2021. File photo: handout/Turkish defence ministry
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A Turkish soldier was killed in a mortar attack blamed on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Kurdistan Region’s Metina area, Turkey’s Ministry of National Defence said late Thursday.
The soldier was severely injured in the attack and later succumbed to his injuries, it said in a tweet.
The ministry claimed three PKK fighters were “neutralized,” a term Turkey’s army uses to refer to combatants killed or injured on the battlefield, and vowed “operations in the area will continue.”
The PKK is an armed Kurdish group fighting for the increased rights of Kurds in Turkey. Ankara considers it a terrorist organization and a threat to its national security. Turkish forces regularly pursue the PKK within the Kurdistan Region’s borders.
Turkey has launched a series of operations against the PKK in recent years, with the most recent beginning in April. Duhok’s Metina area, on the Turkish border, is the focus of Operation Claw-Thunderbolt, and Operation Claw-Lightning targets the Avashin and Basyan areas further east.
The PKK said in late July that they have carried out 398 attacks against the Turkish army since the two operations began April, and have “punished” 494 Turkish soldiers and injured 63 others.
The group also acknowledged 63 deaths in its own ranks during the latest operations.
The conflict is devastating local populations and the environment. Villagers have fled their homes, and bombs and airstrikes have sparked fires that are difficult to extinguish because of ongoing clashes and remote locations.
Verifying information of casualties and material losses over decades of the conflict is a challenge. A parliamentary report last year concluded that at least 504 villages have been emptied across the Kurdistan Region since 1992 and hundreds of people have been killed. In Duhok alone, 366 villages have been abandoned since 1998, a dozen of them in the past year.
Thousands of acres of land have been scorched in fires started by the conflict.
According to figures compiled by the International Crisis Group, which tracks the PKK-Turkey conflict, in the first six months of 2021, there have been 144 fatalities. The dead are 33 Turkish soldiers, 103 PKK fighters, and eight civilians. The majority of the casualties this year have occurred in the Kurdistan Region.
Since the decades-long conflict was reignited in 2015 following the collapse of peace efforts, at least 5,464 people have been killed, including 549 civilians.
Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said 18,292 “terrorists” have been neutralized since July 24, 2015.
Comments
Rudaw moderates all comments submitted on our website. We welcome comments which are relevant to the article and encourage further discussion about the issues that matter to you. We also welcome constructive criticism about Rudaw.
To be approved for publication, however, your comments must meet our community guidelines.
We will not tolerate the following: profanity, threats, personal attacks, vulgarity, abuse (such as sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia), or commercial or personal promotion.
Comments that do not meet our guidelines will be rejected. Comments are not edited – they are either approved or rejected.
Post a comment