Iraq launches massive military operation against Kurdish rebels

Text by: RFI Follow

Turkey announced on Wednesday the deployment of special forces in northern Iraq as part of a ground operation against fighters from the Workers' Party of Kurdistan, the PKK. The operation, which followed intense air strikes, was supported by Turkish aviation and artillery.

Publicity

With our correspondent in Istanbul, Anne Andlauer

It is a major operation, the largest of the Turkish army in northern Iraq for at least five years. Operation "Eagle Claw", as Ankara called it, had started on the night of Sunday to Monday with air strikes covering a large area from the Sinjar Mountains in the west to the Qandil Mountains in the is, with the help of fighter planes and drones.

Two days later, the operation therefore entered its land phase, under the name of operation "Tiger's Claw", with the deployment of special forces. The incursion of Turkish commandos, supported by combat helicopters and armed drones, was preceded by intense artillery bombardment, said the Turkish Ministry of Defense on its Twitter account, where it publishes several times a day. videos of the operation.

The PKK targeted

According to the ministry, the Turkish army is targeting bases of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan, the PKK, which has been established for thirty years in the Qandil mountains. The Sinjar region, for its part, is a more recent target of Ankara, who maintains that the PKK uses this mountain range as a corridor to connect its barrier bases of Qandil to northeastern Syria. But Sinjar is also the land of the Yezidis, a community that suffered the massacres of the Islamic State group in 2014.

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• Iraq
• Turkey
• Kurds

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