Turkey often carries out attacks on Kurdish targets in Iraq and Syria, and sometimes those aren’t obvious military targets. That was the case with today’s strike in Duhok Province.
The artillery strike targeted a tourist resort, killing at least eight civilians and wounding dozens of others. Local officials say that the resort was far away from any militants, and were unclear why they ended up getting hit.
Turkey, for their part, accused Kurdish militants of the attack. That doesn’t really track with reports, and indeed it’s not uncommon for Turkey to just hit northern Iraq out of the blue.
Iraq criticized the attack as a flagrant violation of their sovereignty, noting that most of the casualties were women and children. Complaints like this are not new, and Turkey has shown no sign of dialing back unilateral strikes in Kurdish territory.
The US shouldn’t support governments that randomly kill tourists.
Why not. We randomly kill civilians wherever we want. Turkey is our ally. So, the CIA and the Pentagon think its OK.
Right… the US and it’s western “partners” have absolutely no problem with mass killing of civilians, tourists or otherwise, in pursuit of their military agendas. They only have a problem with it when countries and groups they don’t like do it. Even then the sympathy for victims is largely performative and designed to play to home audiences who still think the west is a bastion of “Enlightenment values.”
The west has no moral legitimacy whatsoever. It squandered that, to the extent that it had it, a long time ago. The things it accuses its enemies of doing it does itself. It’s an exercise in projection and PR/propaganda and has little to do with observable reality and everything to do with perception management.
I think it has something to do with Dickens… Something about helping to “decrease the surplus population” or some such thing…
Sadly, that’s kind of our jam. Hell, we’ve doing it ourselves since Colombus’ beach blanket bloodbath in sunny Hispaniola.
Iraq cannot and should not make such statements because they do Not have control of their Kurdistan autonomous region which also harbors Israel to perform covert operations against Iran…!