Turkish aircraft strike PKK in northern Iraq

Shafaq News/ Turkiye's warplanes has bombed sites of the anti-Ankara Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Duhok's northern district of Amadiyah, a security source reported on Thursday.

The source told Shafaq News Agency that the bombardment targeted the vicinity of the villages of Palava and Kuhrez, near Mount Matin that overlooks the Amadiyah district.

A villager said locals are frustrated by the almost daily attacks on their hometowns. "We can't leave the village. If we leave, who is going to take care of the farms and livestock?"

He said that the governments in Baghdad and Kurdistan should exert more pressure to stop those never-ending attacks and protect the lives and protecties of the civilians.

The Turkish Armed Forces have been conducting cross-border military operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Northern Iraq since the 1980s.

In July 2015, a two-and-a-half year-long ceasefire broke down, and the conflict between Ankara and militants of the PKK – recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkiye, the U.S., Russia, and the European Union – entered one of its deadliest chapters in nearly four decades.

Since that date, the conflict has progressed through several phases. Between roughly 2015 and 2017 the violence devastated communities in some urban centers of Turkiye's majority-Kurdish southeast and – at times – struck into the heart of the country's largest metropolitan centers. From 2017 onward, the fighting moved into rural areas of Turkiye's southeast.

As the Turkish military pushed more militants out of Turkiye, by 2019 the conflict's concentration shifted to northern Iraq and northern Syria.