Alwaght- Turkey's airstrikes on northern Iraq has claimed lives of many innocent Kurds and made many others to abandon their homeland.
The Iraqi town of Makhmour, which has twice become a village of 12,000 refugees, including for Turkish Kurds who fled the Turkey’s internal conflict in the 1990s, was overran by ISIS terrorists in the summer.
Kurdish Peshmerga and PKK fighters had eventually repelled the terrorist from the camp; now, Kurds are again forced to flee, this time in the mountain villages under attack from Turkey’s air force, The Independent reported, adding Images shared on social media over the weekend revealed the aftermath of one Turkish air strike on Zargali, around 80 miles away from Makhmour in northern Iraq. They show a man standing in ruins of a home. The floor is littered with broken cement blocks and a blanket barely conceals the burnt body of a woman.
"We saw smoke rising from the village,” Witnesses Dilzar Mustafa told The Independent. “When we arrived we saw total mess and destruction. I saw several dead bodies and houses that were destroyed, including the village’s mosque that was partly damaged.”
Under the cover of fighting ISIS, whom many accuse Turkey of aiding, Ankara launched airstrikes against the PKK, which is one of the main forces battling ISIS on the ground in northern Iraq, alongside its Kurdish sister group, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria.
The Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency has claimed that some 260 rebels have been killed in air raids against PKK targets in northern Iraq. The PKK says the number killed is far lower.
Ramazan Bozan, the commander of the Makhmour camp, says that the war of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the PKK and the resulting civilian deaths is worse than the terrorism of ISIS terrorist group.
Turkey that has given the US permission is carrying airstrikes from a key air base in the south of the country to target PKK fighters.
