4 civilians killed in Turkish airstrikes on KRG border areas

The attack, which took place at around 1:00 a.m. local time, targeted the villages of Sarkan, Mawnan, and Wasan, close to the triangle border between Iraq,  Turkey and Iran, according to a Rudaw reporter.

“Four young people who were in the area for a picnic and stayed overnight were martyred,” Ahmad Qadir, mayor of Choman, told Rudaw on Thursday morning. He said Turkish fighter jets carried out the attack.

Those killed are all civilians, Qadir said. But PKK-linked media reported that two of them were KRG Peshmerga fighters who were on picnic at the time in the area when the attack happened. 

Turkey frequently targets the border areas of the Kurdistan Region  under the pretext there are Kurdish fighters opposed to Ankara hiding  out there.

The four people who were killed are all law graduates of Koya University: Shera Mahmud, Kaka Mustafa Warti, Mohammed Ismael Warti, and Darbaz Mohammed.

Their age is between 28 and 31.

Omar Rasul, a relative of Mahmud, said that the four friends visited Sarkan village for picnic. It is the first time that the Turkish military attacks the village mentioned, he said. 

"The site [in Sarkan] that the Turkish fighter jets bombed does not have any PKK positions," he said, "it is a residential area where civilians live."

Hundreds of people gathered at a graveyard outside of Erbil to bury Mahmud, a Peshmerga fighter who was planning to get married after the Newroz holidays, one of his friends told Rudaw.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed on Wednesday that his  forces had “neutralized” 38 fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party  (PKK) in northern Iraq in airstrikes on Shingal.