Members of the left-wing nationalist Turkish Youth Union (TGB) shout slogans during a protest against the new solution process to be carried out with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in Istanbul. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

Turkish police detained 282 suspects accused of ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, militant group, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Tuesday (February 18, 2025), among them journalists, politicians, and academics.

The raids of the last five days came as Turkiye continues to remove elected pro-Kurdish mayors from their posts over militant ties in a crackdown coinciding with hopes for an end to a 40-year conflict between the PKK and authorities.

Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan is expected to make a statement on such efforts, four months after an ally of President Tayyip Erdogan urged him to call on the militants to lay down their arms.

The Journalists’ Union of Turkiye condemned the detention of three journalists.

“We do not accept that they are detained through house raids instead of being summoned to the police station,” the union said in a statement on social media.

Those detained included members of the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK), as well as smaller leftist parties, academics and a prominent LGBTQ rights activist.

Police carried out counter-terror raids in 51 provinces, including the capital Ankara and the largest city, Istanbul. Yerlikaya said the suspects were accused of conducting PKK propaganda, providing financing for the group, recruiting members, and joining street protests.

Police seized two AK-47 rifles among other weapons, he added.

On Saturday (February 15, 2025) Turkiye removed a pro-Kurdish DEM Party mayor from office in the eastern province of Van over terrorism-related convictions, bringing the total number of dismissed DEM mayors to eight since the 2024 elections.

The PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Turkiye and its Western allies, has waged an insurgency against the state since 1984, in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000.

Ten fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed, Iraqi Kurdish authorities said Thursday, as Turkey said it launched renewed air strikes on northern Iraq.

Turkey has intensified its cross-border air raids against Kurdish targets in northeastern Syria and northern Iraq in retaliation for an October 1 suicide bombing in Ankara which injured two policemen.

That attack was claimed by a branch of the outlawed PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey and is considered a “terrorist” group by Ankara and its Western allies.

“Nine PKK fighters were killed in a series of air strikes launched by Turkish warplanes and drones” in Arbil province in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, the Kurdish counter-terrorism service said in a statement.

A tenth PKK member was killed and three others wounded in “the bombing of several locations” belonging to the group in Dohuk province, it added.

Turkey’s defence ministry on Thursday confirmed conducting air strikes on targets in five areas of northern Iraq, saying “many terrorists were neutralised”.

“A total of 19 targets including caves, shelters and depots used by terrorists.. were successfully destroyed and many terrorists were neutralised,” it said of the strikes which were carried out on Wednesday.

The Turkish military rarely comments on its operations in Iraq but it frequently carries out ground and air offensives against the PKK and its positions in northern Iraq.

Earlier this month, Turkey’s parliament extended the military’s authorisation to launch cross-border operations in Syria and Iraq by two more years.

Such operations were first approved in 2013 to support the international campaign against the Islamic State group, and have since been renewed annually.

Over the past 25 years, Turkey has installed dozens of military bases in Iraqi Kurdistan to fight against the PKK, which also has outposts there.

The Iraqi federal government in Baghdad and Kurdish authorities in Arbil have for years been accused of turning a blind eye to the Turkish bombardments to preserve their strategic alliance with Ankara, a key trading partner, despite statements protesting violations of Iraqi sovereignty and harm to civilians.

In summer 2022, nine people died when artillery shells hit a recreational park in the Iraqi Kurdish border village of Parakh, with most of those killed holidaymakers from southern Iraq.

Baghdad blamed Turkey for the strike but Ankara denied responsibility and pointed the finger at the PKK.

In late July, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani’s office announced that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would visit Iraq but so far, no date has been set.

The premises of an airfield used by Iraqi Kurdish forces is pictured in Arbat, near Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s Kurdistan, after three members of a Kurdish anti-terrorist unit were killed in a drone strike that hit the airfield.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Six people were killed on Monday, September 18, 2023, in a drone strike on the small military airport of Arbid in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, a local official and a security source told Reuters.

Iraqi Kurdish security forces sealed off the area, according to two security sources.

Arbid is a small airport used for helicopters located 50 km to the east of the city of Sulaimaniya in the northeast of the country.

Two members of the Kurdish security forces were wounded in the attack and were rushed to a military hospital in Sulaimaniya under tight security, said the police source.

Police said the identities of the deceased were still unknown.

One security source said initial information suggested a Turkish drone was used in the attack against a suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) target.

Turkey regularly carries out air strikes on PKK militants in northern Iraq and has dozens of outposts in Iraqi territory. The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.

Bafel Talabani, President of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the dominant Kurdish parties in northern Iraq, confirmed the drone strike but said the six dead and wounded were members of the Iraqi Kurdish counter-terrorism force.

“We strongly condemn the terrorist attack on the Agricultural Airport of Arbid in Sulaimaniya, which resulted in the martyrdom and injury of six heroic Peshmerga …,” he said in a statement.

Iraqi Kurdistan’s internal security forces, Asayish, said in a statement the counter-terrorism force was attacked and three members were killed during a training mission inside the “agricultural airport”.

Iraqi Kurdistan’s Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani condemned the drone attack and demanded the intervention of the federal government authorities to “prevent these attacks from recurring”.

Two Iraqi army intelligence officers said Baghdad will send a joint security team to Sulaimaniya to investigate the strike.