Turkey’s Ministry of Defence has released footage showing the destruction of a Kurdish farmer’s home, which it blew up in the course of its ongoing military operations in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
Speaking to the Iraqi Kurdish news agency Rudaw, farmer Khayri Hakim responded to the footage of his own home’s destruction. Lamenting the “20 years” work he put into constructing the home, Hakim said: “I have received a loan, which I haven’t paid off yet… I spent $60-70,000 on the house until it was completed. Now I don’t know what to do. I feel utterly destroyed. There is nothing left.”
Turkey has established seven new bases deep inside Iraqi Kurdish territory, bringing the total to 71, raising concerns about a de facto Turkish occupation under the guise of operations against the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). According to the Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), Turkey has carried out 238 bombardments since the start of the new operation, displacing at least 162 villages and threatening another 602 with displacement. In addition, 2,000 hectares of farmland have been destroyed, indicating a permanent military presence facilitated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Rudaw spoke to another farmer whose farmland was burned in the same region, in the Duhok governate. Rashid Ismail said: “I relied on farming to survive. I sold agricultural products and animals. In this way, I supported myself and my family, but now it’s all gone, there’s nothing left. We’ve become street urchins. We had [0.6 hectares] of land, full of all kinds of trees, but they’re all gone.”
Also speaking to Rudaw, earlier this week an Iraqi-Kurdish villager experiencing intense Turkish airstrikes likened the atrocities to “another Anfal”, referring to the genocidal campaign launched by Ba’athist Iraq in 1988. Turkey’s new attacks in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) are having a devastating impact on local Kurdish villagers who bear the brunt of the operations.
An elderly man from Mezhe expressed his grief: “I have lost ten members of my family. Don’t I have the right to cry?” Another villager described the devastation in Kevnemij, where fires spread from nearby attacks and destroyed 90 percent of the village. “The fires have consumed our fields and houses. Everything we had is gone,” he lamented. A third villager described how his tractor and farmland were completely burnt, leaving him with nothing.
The coverage by Rudaw is noteworthy since the media organisation is affiliated to the KDP, the governing authority in the KRI which has facilitated and supported the Turkish operations on its territory. Other recent coverage on Rudaw has cited the federal Iraqi government’s condemnation of the ongoing military operations.
