ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Mystery surrounds a helicopter that crashed near a Duhok village on Wednesday evening with local and regional authorities denying ownership of the aircraft.
An unidentified helicopter crashed in Duhok’s Chamanke subdistrict on Wednesday night, killing seven people onboard. The area is known for frequent clashes between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
“When the incident occurred, there were three to four families in the village,” Abdullah Osman, a resident of the village, told Rudaw’s Naif Ramadhan on Thursday.
“It was alarming, but thank God the people of the village were unharmed. The helicopter crashed nearly 50 meters away from the [oil] field,” he said.
Employees of a nearby oil company were the first to upload video of the crash to social media. They reported seeing two helicopters in the air that night.
Turkey, Iraq, and the US-led coalition have all denied that the helicopter was theirs, according to the Erbil-based Kurdistan counterterrorism directorate.
The US-led coalition has forces based in the Kurdistan Region and Turkey and Iran frequently fly into Iraqi airspace, but a security expert believes days of stormy weather would have kept neighbouring militaries on the ground. “It is impossible that the helicopter came from outside [of Iraq],” Lieutenant Ahmed Arif told Rudaw. “Powerhouse countries like Turkey and Iran would not present themselves during this weather.”
The Kurdistan counterterrorism directorate identified the helicopter as a Eurocopter AS350 and that “several” PKK fighters were among the casualties.
The PKK has not officially commented on the incident. However, Zagros Hiwa, a spokesperson for the group, told Associated Press that they do not possess any helicopters and suggested that the chopper might belong to the US-led coalition and was carrying members of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – A Kurdish coalition ally in Syria.
Other sources have suggested to Al-Monitor that the helicopter belonged to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which might have come to the possession of the aircraft due to its close ties to Iran. The PUK has not yet commented on the incident.
Severe burns means the bodies recovered from the crash have not been identified yet though there have been reports that a counterterrorism official from northeast Syria’s (Rojava) Kurdish administration, going by the codename Abdo, was one of the casualties.
Rudaw English has reached out to the coalition forces for comment.
Chamanke in Duhok province is located 15 kilometers from Mount Gara, a region where Ankara in Februrary 2021 launched an operation dubbed Claw-Eagle-2 and targeting the PKK.
