Turkish national shot dead in Sulaimaniyah

Shafaq News/ A Turkish national was reportedly killed on Thursday in a busy area of central Sulaimaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Eyewitness told Shafaq News Agency that the victim was shot and killed by an individual riding a motorcycle. The incident occurred in the Majid Beg area, near the Dabashan Fish Restaurant.

The motive for the crime and the identity of the victim are still unknown, but the eyewitness reported that the victim was believed to be a Turk.

Police and emergency forces arrived at the scene and transferred the victim's body to the forensic department. The police obtained CCTV footage from the area and started an investigation into the incident.

In July 2019, a Turkish diplomat was killed after gunmen entered an upscale restaurant where he was dining and opened fire in Erbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region.

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 Turkey, 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 Turkey'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 Turkey's southeast.

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