Iraqi Kurds in border zone flee Turkey's hunt for PKK

SULAIMANIYAH: One fine day in May, Yohanna Khushfa gathered his 200 sheep and took off, along with 120 other villagers in Iraqi Kurdistan, fearful of the Turkish drones hunting Kurdish separatists.

"Shrapnel blew out our windows and furniture," the mayor of Jelki, a village in the Al-Amadiya area, told AFP.

"We were afraid for our lives and we left," said the 71-year-old, reached by telephone from a rugged strip near the Turkish border.

Since Turkey launched a new military campaign in northern Iraq on April 23, three civilians have been killed and four wounded.

Amongst those, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a senior official from Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

In the face of Turkey's actions, some 1,500 people from 300 families have fled their villages, according to Iraq's ministry for the displaced.

Others already left long ago, among them Berqi Islam, who fled in 2017 from Shiladzi, an area near the border where his brother was killed in Turkish bombing.

With his family's farmland burnt down and no compensation paid by Iraqi Kurdish or federal authorities, he has yet to return.

Erdogan, who has threatened to "clean up" parts of northern Iraq, accuses the PKK of using the mountainous border area as a springboard for its insurgency.

The PKK has waged a rebellion in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984 that has claimed more than 40,000 lives.

'Permanent presence'

Erdogan is willing to move "Turkey's ongoing military confrontation with the PKK from Turkey to territory the PKK controls or transits through in Iraq," said Aykan Erdemir, senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

He said Baghdad and Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and an ally of Ankara, appear to have accepted this.

The growing Turkish presence in Iraqi Kurdistan "has been evolving into a permanent Turkish presence in the region", said Erdemir, a former opposition lawmaker in Turkey.

The Iraqi state, tied up with chasing down remnants of the Islamic State group and often challenged by pro-Iran shiite armed groups "has no means of pressure on the PKK to make it leave", explained Adel Bakawan, director of the French Center for Research on Iraq (CFRI).

In a sign of Turkey's growing confidence, its defence minister visited troops on Iraqi soil in early May, even though the dozen bases and other military posts that the Turkish army has set up over the past quarter of a century are illegal in the eyes of Iraqi law.

Baghdad has summoned the Turkish ambassador several times in protest over Turkey's military actions, but the bombs continue to fall -- taking away 2.5 percent of Iraq's forested areas, "an inhuman environmental crime" in the words of Iraqi President Barham Saleh.