A missile strike from Turkish drones has killed a senior official of the autonomous administration in Sinjar (Shengal), northern Iraq, on Tuesday.
As Merwan Bedel Xwededa, the co-chair of Sinjar’s Autonomous Administration was killed in the attack, his two children survived the Turkish drone strike, according to Roj News Agency.
The attack took place in the Xanesor region around 2 PM local time.
Merwan Bedel Xwededa had earlier expressed strong criticism of Turkey’s ally the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s (KDP) move to establish a military presence in Sinjar, saying that KDP intended to lay the ground for provocations in Sinjar.
Since 2017 Turkey has been continuously targeting officials, fighters and civilians in Sinjar, the homeland of the Yazidi people, after the occupation of the Islamic State (ISIS) ended with its defeat.
Ten people were killed in a Turkish air attacks on 16 and 17 August this year in Sinjar including those in a medical facility.
At least 33 individuals had been killed previously between 2017 and 2021 as a result of Turkish airstrikes, according to a report by the International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism.
An estimated 10,000 Yazidis had been killed during ISIS’ attacks in Sinjar in 2014, and about 7,000 Yazidi women and girls had been enslaved and forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq and eastern Syria. While the massacre of Yazidis in the hands of ISIS has been recognised by the United Nations and many other states as ‘genocide’, Turkey’s attacks meet with no international reaction.
