SULAIMANIYAH: A drone attack on a car in Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdish region killed three people on Wednesday, a local official told AFP.

Turkiye has maintained dozens of military bases in northern Iraq for the past quarter of a century as part of its campaign against militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The leftist group has waged an on-off insurgency against Turkiye since 1984, and is blacklisted as a “terrorist organisation” by Ankara and its Western allies.

“This afternoon a drone bombed a car on the Dokan-Khalakan road, killing three people,” Dokan district governor Sirwan Sarhad told AFP.

“There are three burned people in the car,” he added, saying that two had been identified as a father and son who lived in the Ranya area of Kurdistan.

The federal government in Baghdad discreetly outlawed the PKK as a “banned organisation” in March, and last month agreed a military cooperation deal with Ankara that will see joint training and command centres set up in the fight against the militants.

On August 23, a drone strike, which officials in the Kurdish region blamed on Turkiye, killed two women journalists working for PKK-funded outlets.

And on Tuesday, the Turkish defence ministry said its forces had launched air strikes on the PKK in the mountains of northern Iraq, claiming to have killed “numerous” militants.

Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2024