A drone strike on Thursday killed three people including a child in Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdish region, where the Turkish military regularly targets Kurdish fighters, a local official said.
“This afternoon, a drone attacked a pick-up, killing three people, including a child,” Osman Anwar, the district governor of Chwarta, where the attack took place, told AFP.
The driver was identified as “a regular citizen, a farmer,” but the identity of the two other passengers was not known due to the severity of their burns, Anwar said, adding that the strike targeted the vehicle near the village of Harmeleh.
Turkey 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 Turkey since 1984, and is blacklisted as a “terrorist organization” by Ankara and its Western allies.
Thursday’s strike comes a day after a similar attack on a car in the autonomous region that also killed three people, a father and his two teenaged sons aged 18 and 14, according to Kamaran Osman, a human rights officer from the Community Peacemaker Teams organization.
The Turkish defense ministry on Tuesday said its forces had launched air strikes on the PKK in the mountains of northern Iraq, claiming to have killed “numerous” militants.
Iraq’s federal government in Baghdad discreetly outlawed the PKK as a “banned organization” in March, and last month agreed a military cooperation deal with Ankara that will see joint training and command centers set up in the fight against the militants.
On August 23, a drone strike that officials in the Kurdish region blamed on Turkey killed two women journalists working for PKK-funded outlets.