Update: two explosions heard near a village in Duhok

Shafaq News/ Two explosions were reportedly heard near a village in the north of the Kurdistan region's border governorate of Duhok on Tuesday.

Eyewitnesses told Shafaq News Agency that explosions were heard in the vicinity of the Asihi village, north of the Kani Masi district.

The explosions are believed to be caused by two artillery projectiles.

"The bombs landed near a residential area and the people were petrified and angry," an eyewitness said.

Last December, Turkey's defense ministry said that 12 soldiers had been killed in clashes with militants affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq.

Later, the Turkish Air Force conducted air strikes in northern Iraq and Syria and destroyed 29 targets of the outlawed PKK.

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.