Eight villages emptied amid Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Eight villages close to northern Iraq’s border town of Zakho have been emptied out as locals flee under the roar of Turkish airstrikes, Kurdish officials tell Rudaw.

Turkey has deployed commando forces four kilometres deep into northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, causing residents of eight villages to flee, local authorities in Zakho have confirmed to Rudaw. The military offensive launched this week, dubbed Operation Claw-Tiger, involves a combined aerial and ground-based assault aimed at targeting suspected positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the region.

The villages are located in Batifa, a small subdistrict in the Sinat-Haftanin mountainous district near the city of Zakho, close to the Turkish border. In Keshan, one of the villages now empty, residents have abandoned their properties, fearing the aerial bombardment.

"We have brought our family members here to Zakho. Around three to four bombs fell right behind our village on Tuesday night," Salim Khawaja, whose family makes a living on sheep, told Rudaw. "We could not take our sheep out for gazing."

Although farmers are not party to the conflict, they risk losing out on their livelihood, as their farmlands are their only source of income.

"We are around 15 families living in the village, Turkey's bombings continued through last night,” Hashim Omer, a resident of Keshan village, told Rudaw on Wednesday. “We were forced to abandon our homes. Just some of them who have sheep have stayed. If the situation continues like it is now, they will leave as well." 

Both the PKK and Turkish forces have had military bases along the Turkey-Iraq border decades. 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.

"This is not the right thing they do against us. We are poor people. Our livelihood is in our village. We beg them to stop," said Isa Osman, an elderly resident who has moved with family members to the nearest city center, Zakho, to wait for hostilities to cease.

An Iraqi border official in Zakho told Rudaw that they have already expressed their anger over Turkish ground and air offensive in the region, claiming that Turkey has not coordinated with Iraq’s security forces.

"We were not informed of the attack," Diler Farzanda Zebari, commander of Border Force One, told Rudaw on Wednesday, adding the region has become a "prohibited zone" because of the presence of the PKK and Turkish forces.

Over the past two years, 35 out of 75 villages in Batifa have seen their populations thin out and empty due to fighting in the region. 

Both Erbil and Baghdad have called on Ankara to halt attacks on its territory, while also demanding that the PKK withdraw. 

Baghdad summoned its ambassador to Turkish to protest the airstrikes on Tuesday, issuing him a formal memorandum, according to Iraq's foreign ministry.

"This invitation, like the previous ones, was a new occasion to emphasize that we will continue to fight the PKK wherever it is, unless Iraq takes steps to end the PKK presence in its country,” Ambassador Fatih Yildiz tweeted after the meeting.

For decades now, Turkey regularly carries out airstrikes and ground operations against suspected PKK positions inside the 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 to win 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, 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 foreign relations department did not respond to requests for comments by Rudaw English. No civilian casualties have yet been reported as part of Operation Claw-Tiger.