ISTANBUL — Turkish airstrikes killed at least 35 people in the Kurdish border region with Iraq on Thursday in what the army said was an operation aimed at separatist fighters. Local villagers said the dead were instead young diesel smugglers who had been misidentified by the Turkish military.
The strikes occurred in northern Iraq near the Turkish town of Uludere along a rugged route used both by smugglers to transport goods like diesel and cigarettes by mules between the countries and by militants from the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K., who launch cross-border attacks into Turkey.
The Turkish Armed Forces said in a statement that it had recent intelligence that separatist group, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, was preparing for a large-scale attack and asserted that smugglers in the area have been known to transport guns for the group. “It is known from previous terrorists’ testimonies that heavy weapons, ammunition and explosives used in separatist terror organization attacks have been smuggled though Iraq on pack animals,” the statement said, in an indirect response to claims by local villagers.
“The place where the incident took place is Sinat-Haftanin area in northern Iraq, where main camps of the separatist terror organization are located, and is unpopulated by civilians,” the statement said. The Turkish army stepped up operations in the predominantly Kurdish southeast as well as inside northern Iraq after several deadly attacks by the P.K.K. last summer.
The governing Justice and Development Party made no immediate comments on the killings, which the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party denounced as a massacre of mostly young civilians ages 17 to 20.
Selahattin Demirtas, the deputy chairman of the Peace and Democracy Party, compared Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria for, he said, tolerating the killing of his own citizens. “An administration that murders its own people has no legitimacy,” Mr. Demirtas said, repeating Mr. Erdogan’s words about Mr. Assad, according to local media reports. “Those killed were mostly children and youth, including youngsters that prepared for college. These are villagers that survive on smuggling.”
The struggle between the Turkish government and Kurdish separatists has claimed more than 40,000 lives since the mid-1980s and scared off most business investment from the mountainous region, making it Turkey’s poorest.
The governing party has recently sought a political resolution to the decades-old conflict, proposing a draft constitution that would grant greater rights to ethnic minorities.
Yet hundreds of pro-Kurdish activists who could potentially support the political process remain in jail as part of clampdown on a pro-Kurdish political network that prosecutors claim to be the separatists’ urban wing, forcibly collecting funds, organizing attacks and building separatist strategies.
No comments:
Post a Comment