Five peshmerga, the fighters of Iraqi Kurdistan, were killed on Saturday in an ambush by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish rebel group in Turkey which has its rear base in northern Iraq, said a Kurdish deputy minister.
This attack on Mount Metin in Dohuk, a province of Iraqi Kurdistan bordering Turkey, also injured two peshmerga, added Serbast Lazkin, deputy minister of Peshmerga in the government of the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq.
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The People's Defense Forces (HPG), the armed wing of the PKK, accused the peshmerga of having "
entered a zone of conflict in Metin
" between the PKK and the Turkish army "
which wants to occupy
Iraqi
Kurdistan
". "
These peshmerga movements are a stab in the back of the PKK and we refuse their entry into an area under our control,
" they add in their statement.
This violence comes at a time when Ankara has been leading a new military campaign, air and sometimes land, against the PKK since April 23, which it considers "
terrorist
". Turkey denounces violations of its sovereignty from Iraq and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke in early June of the Makhmour region, where the PKK is active south of Dohuk. "
If the United Nations does not clean up this place, then we will take care of it as a member of the United Nations
," he warned.
The region is 250 km south of the Turkish border, but for Erdogan "
Makhmour has almost become the incubator of Qandil
", a stronghold of the PKK further north, and "
if we do not intervene, this incubator will continue to produce (terrorists)
”.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Peshmerga ministry officially called on "
everyone to respect Kurdistan's borders and not to endanger its security and stability
".
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The PKK, which refuses to recognize the Iraqi Kurdish government and militates for a unified Kurdistan straddling Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, is as much the enemy of Ankara as of Erbil, capital of Kurdistan Iraqi. Turkey, which has de facto installed around ten military bases for 25 years in Iraqi Kurdistan, regularly bombs rear bases of the PKK in the mountains of northern Iraq, which since 1984 has been delivering bloody guerrillas on Turkish soil having carried out more than 40,000 dead.