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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A shepherd was found dead on Thursday as northern Iraq comes under assault from both Turkish airstrikes and Iranian artillery fire over the past two days, a local official has informed Rudaw.
"At 11 am on Wednesday, Turkish jets struck the Khinera area in Sidakan sub-district, killing a shepherd named Abbas Maghdid, aged 30," Ihsan Chalabi, mayor of the district of Sidakan told Rudaw on Thursday.
Sidakan and Haji Omaran, two remote towns near Iran’s border with the Kurdistan Region’s Erbil province, have been bombarded by Turkish and Iranian strikes in recent days as part of a combined aerial and ground-based assault aimed at targeting suspected positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the region.
“In the first 36 hours of the operation, Turkish forces hit over 500 targets of the PKK terror group in the region,” Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported Thursday.
The slain shepherd, from the town of Harir, is the first reported civilian casualty in the recent Turkish offensive into northern Iraq. Chalabi said that the shepherd's family members became concerned when he did not return from grazing with his sheep and went out to search for him. “He had gone out to graze his sheep when the Turkish airstrikes hit the spot," Chalabi said.
"There has been no shelling or airstrikes on the area today," Maasuma Hamad Amin, a local resident of Sidakan, told Rudaw on Thursday.
Although farmers are not party to the conflict, they have been caught in its crosshairs economically, and have fled their villages under the roar of air strikes. Eight villages have been emptied of their residents along northern Iraq’s border with Turkey, near the Kurdistan Region border town of Zakho.
Of the 264 villages part of the Sidakan district, 118 have been emptied due to Turkish airstrikes and Iranian artillery targeting guerillas of the PKK and other Kurdish insurgent groups.
For decades, both the PKK and Turkish forces have set up military installations along the Turkey-Iraq border. The rough, mountainous region is home mostly to poor farmers who struggle to earn a living. These mountains are also home to an untold number of guerrillas of the PKK, who for years have used the Qandil Mountains area as a base of operations. But with their presence comes the threat of attacks by Turkish forces, which have frightened and sometimes threatened local villagers.
Turkish observation posts and military bases are just seven kilometres from the center of Sidakan, district mayor Chalabi told Rudaw. "Very few nights pass without hearing the hover of Turkey's warplanes overhead," according to the mayor. Chalabi also claimed that since 2017, aerial bombings and mortar shellings have killed seven civilians, and wounded another ten in Sidakan.
Farzang Ahmed, mayor of the town of Haji Omaran told Rudaw on Wednesday that residents have formed a joint committee of civil defense, medical teams and police, that is on alert in case of injuries or emergencies.
Iranian and Turkish officials have not officially stated the simultaneous offensives are in coordination, but they reiterated their “commitment to fight terrorism" at a meeting in Ankara on Monday between their foreign ministers.
In recent years, Iran has taken increasingly aggressive measures against clandestine Kurdish opposition groups by digging thousands of kilometers of new dirt roads atop mountain peaks overlooking Kurdish areas, installing thousands of additional troops to seal off its porous western border with Iraq.
After several lethal clashes with Kurdish insurgents in western Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has repeatedly threatened retaliation, and in May, a group of gunmen ambushed a senior IRGC commander of in broad daylight, killing him and two of his guards in Divandareh, in Iran’s Kurdistan province.
A member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDP-I), an Iranian Kurdish opposition group, told Rudaw on Wednesday that none of its members have been harmed in the shelling.
Baghdad has twice summoned its ambassador to Turkish to protest the airstrikes on Tuesday and issued a formal memorandum, Iraq's foreign ministry said Thursday. Turkey regularly carries out airstrikes and ground operations against suspected PKK positions inside northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, at times killing civilians in the region.
The PKK is an armed group that has been at war with the Turkish state since the 1980s with the aim of winning greater political rights for Kurds in Turkey. Decades of bloody fighting has claimed thousands of lives, including civilians on both sides of the conflict. A brief period of respite came between 2013 and 2015, when leaders in Ankara and Qandil entered into peace talks, which eventually broke down and hostilities resumed.
"The operation has been launched in order to ensure the security of the Turkish people and the country’s borders by neutralizing the PKK and other terrorist organizations that have been stepping up harassment and attack attempts against the police and military bases," the Turkish Defense Ministry said in a statement at the launch of its offensive.
The Kurdistan Region’s department of foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comments by Rudaw English.
Additional reporting by Bakhtiyar Qadir
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