Shafaq News / Turkey’s Ministry of Defense said on Friday that Turkish forces had “neutralized” five fighters belonging to the anti-Ankara Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in a series of attacks in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. .
Turkey usually uses the term “neutralized,” which means killed.
In an official statement, the ministry vowed not to stop military operations against the PKK until the entire region has been wiped out.
In December last year, the Ministry of Defense announced that 12 Turkish soldiers had been killed in clashes with PKK militants in northern Iraq over the past two days.
The Turkish Air Force subsequently carried out airstrikes in northern Iraq and Syria, destroying 29 targets of the outlawed PKK.
The Turkish military has been conducting cross-border military operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in northern Iraq since the 1980s.
In July 2015, a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire broke down and the conflict between Ankara and the PKK militants, recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, entered one of its deadliest conflicts. Ta. First chapter in about 40 years.
Since that day, the conflict has progressed through several stages. From approximately 2015 to 2017, violence devastated communities in some Kurdish-majority urban centers in southeastern Turkey, sometimes hitting the heart of the country’s largest metropolitan centers. Since 2017, fighting has moved to rural areas in southeastern Turkey.
By 2019, the concentration of the conflict had shifted to northern Iraq and northern Syria, as Turkish forces drove more militants out of Turkey.
