On the seventeenth of this month, the Security Directorate in Erbil announced that an armed attack occurred in a restaurant in the city, and resulted in the death of a staff member of the Turkish Consulate, for its part, the Turkish Foreign Ministry confirmed the incident.
A Turkish foreign ministry statement said that “one of the staff of the consulate was exposed to an armed attack while he was outside the consular building in Erbil in the afternoon, which led to his death.”
For his part, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned, the attack on the Turkish diplomatic staff in Erbil, Erdogan denounced – in a tweet on Twitter, what he called the treacherous attack on staff in the Turkish consulate in Erbil, and called for mercy of the Turkish employee killed in the attack, and he stressed that the Coordination is continuing with the Iraqi authorities and local officials in Erbil, to find the perpetrators of the attack.
Spokesman for the Turkish Presidency Ibrahim Kalan, in turn, said that Ankara will respond appropriately to the perpetrators of this attack, which he described as a treacherous, adding that the search for the perpetrators of the attack has already begun.
It seems that the Turkish military response was not delayed , as the Turkish Defense Minister Khulosi Akar said that Turkey had launched “the widest” air operation against the PKK in Iraq last Thursday. Akar added “After the attack in Erbil, we directed a severe blow to the PKK,” throughout the largest air operation in the Qandil Mountains. ”
During the operation, which began on Thursday, the Turkish army destroyed shelters and caves for the party, Akar said.
On Thursday evening, Turkish warplanes bombarded positions in the village of Spindar in the Jamanki district of the Amidiya district of Dohuk governorate with rockets, injuring a number of citizens, prompting villagers to detain 3 PKK militants hiding in the village. .
According to news reports, the Turkish planes were chasing a car for the militants of the PKK, where the gunmen hid in the village of Spindar, prompting the Turkish aircraft to bomb sites close to their hiding, resulting in the injury of a number of citizens, and consequently, the villagers detained three of the PKK militants who were inside the car, and the village was bombed because of them.
For its part, the Kurdistan Regional Government expressed deep discontent and concern over the civilian casualties in the Turkish shelling of areas within the territory of the Kurdistan calling on the PKK to move away from villages and residential areas.
For decades, a war has been waged between the successive Turkish governments and the PKK, and it seems that this war with the assassination of the Turkish deputy consul in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, began to take a new curve by targeting Turkish officials outside Turkey. This is very dangerous matter. so the PKK should not involve the Kurdistan region in particular and Iraq in general in its war against Turkey, because the first victim of the Turkish bombing of Iraqi villages in the Kurdistan region of Iraq is the Iraqi citizen, who pays the “bill” of this bombing, the proof for that , as the Turkish bombing began on elements of the PKK , they sought refuge to the homes of citizens to protect themselves from such shelling.
On the Turkish side, not to take the assassination of the Turkish Deputy Consul in Erbil as a pretext to settle its dispute with the PKK on Iraqi territory, because this is an explicit violation of the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, in contrast, the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Erbil reject any attack on the diplomatic figures in Iraq, because that might send a negative message about Iraq to the world, that it is unable to maintain the safety of diplomatic missions and its staff .
In order to deal with this crisis before it takes new dimensions, security and intelligence cooperation between Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government and Turkey must be strengthened. If this security is achieved ,, stability will be achieved , and in the light of complex interrelationships between the various countries of the world today, it would be difficult to separate internal security of any country from the regional circumstances and from the regional security of the adjacent geographical area.
Iraqi Studies Unit
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies