Turkey’s Army has issued a new statement today claiming that they killed 20 militants from the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in three airstrikes, hitting targets in both southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. 16 of the 20 were killed inside Iraqi territory.
The statement claimed that the PKK fighters inside Iraq were preparing to carry out some sort of attack, though they offered no details on what they were actually planning or where. Turkish strikes against northern Iraq are extremely common, with the military always claiming the slain are all militants.
Indeed, the PKK does have a substantial presence in northern Iraq, which is because during the ceasefire and peace negotiations of recent years, Turkey had the PKK agree to send a lot of its fighters into camps in northern Iraq, pending some sort of settlement.
When the Erdogan government scrapped the ceasefire with the PKK, they immediately started attacking not only the Kurdish cities within Turkey, but the camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, and those areas have been consistently under attack by Turkish military forces ever since.