Two PKK-linked Iraq fighters killed in strike blamed on Turkiye

Two members of a group affiliated with Turkiye’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party have been killed in a Turkish drone strike in northwestern Iraq, Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Tuesday.

The pair, who were killed late on Monday, were members of the Sinjar Resistance Units, a group founded among the district’s Yazidi community in response to a brutal occupation by terrorists of the Daesh group nearly a decade ago.

There was no immediate word from the Turkish military, which has conducted a deadly air campaign against PKK targets in Iraq and neighboring Syria but rarely comments on individual strikes.

“A Turkish army drone targeted a vehicle of the Sinjar Resistance Units in the town of Sinuni, killing a security official and a fighter who was escorting him,” the counterterrorism services of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region said in a statement.

Sinjar and its adjacent mountains are one of the twin heartlands of Iraq’s Yazidi community, a non-Muslim Kurdish speaking minority that was savagely oppressed by Daesh when they overran the district in 2014.

Hundreds of Yazidi men were executed while women were repeatedly raped and shared out among terrorists as sex slaves in a reign of terror qualified as genocide by UN investigators.

The Sinjar Resistance Units were formed in 2014 with help from fellow Kurds of the PKK, a group blacklisted by Turkiye and many of its Western allies as a terrorist organization.

The Sinjar force is also affiliated with the Hashed Al-Shaabi, an alliance of mainly Shiite armed groups formed to fight Daesh and now integrated in the regular armed forces.

Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to continue stepping up its strikes on “terrorist” targets in Iraq and Syria.