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15-01-2024
ISTANBUL: Turkey carried out air strikes in northern Syria and Iraq, hitting 25 Kurdish militant targets, the Turkish Defence Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
The operations were conducted in northern Syria and Metina, Hakurk and Qandil regions of northern Iraq at 9 p.m. (1800 GMT), the ministry said.
The defence ministry said many militants were “neutralized”, a term mostly used to mean killed in air strikes that destroyed 25 targets consisting of caves, shelters and depots.
Nine Turkish soldiers were killed in a clash on Friday with members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
There was no immediate comment from the PKK, the government in Baghdad or the Kurdish region’s administration.
Turkey launched Operation Claw-Lock in northern Iraq in April 2022, during which it established several bases in Duhok Governorate. Baghdad has repeatedly protested the presence of Turkish troops and called for their withdrawal.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan expressed his condolences for the deaths of the Turkish soldiers.
“We will fight to the end against the PKK terrorist organization within and outside our borders,” he tweeted.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later chaired a security meeting in Istanbul at which Turkey’s counterterrorism strategy was evaluated, the government said in statement.
For the time being, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced police had detained 113 people suspected of ties to the PKK following raids across 32 Turkish provinces.
He added that six people were arrested after police identified 110 social media accounts that “praised the separatist terrorist organization for provocative purposes” or had spread misleading information.
Three weeks ago, PKK-affiliated militants tried to break into a Turkish base in northern Iraq, according to Turkish officials, leaving six soldiers dead. The following day, six more Turkish soldiers were killed in clashes.
Turkey retaliated by launching strikes against sites that officials said were associated with the PKK in Iraq and Syria. Defense Minister Yasar Guler said at the time that dozens of Kurdish militants were killed in airstrikes and land assaults.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Friday night’s attack and the one three weeks earlier targeted the same base. The Rudaw news website, based in Erbil in northern Iraq, reported that the base attacked on Friday was located on Mount Zap in Amedi district, which lies 17 kilometers (about 10 miles) from the Turkish border.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu said that a senior PKK militant was “neutralized” in Iraq. Faik Aydin was targeted in an operation run by Turkish intelligence agency MIT, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) inside the Turkey-Iraq frontier, Anadolu reported. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
