The Turkish base in Bashiqa, Iraq, was targeted with rocket strikes, sources reported on Sunday.
Several rockets were fired in two successive attacks, two rockets landing in the vicinity of the headquarters of the 112 Peshmerga brigade, near the base, and the next four landing in a field near the base an hour later, according to Shafaq News.
The source speaking to Shafaq said that while the first strike originated from a site near the Talkif district, the second originated from a site on the west side of Mosul.
The top official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Mosul, Xeyas Surçi, said to Hawar News that the base had been targeted earlier in rocket attacks.
There is no information yet on the impact caused by the attack, or by whom the attacks were conducted.
Turkish troops had been deployed to the area in December 2015 on the pretext of training Iraqi and Kurdish forces in their fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) after the group maintained control in the area.
Turkey-Iraq relations were strained in the wake of the Turkish deployment. Some 150 Turkish troops are currently present in the area.
The establishment of the Turkish base in the region has different implications than the establishment of Turkish bases in Iraqi Kurdistan along the Turkish-Iraqi border, because the district of Bashiqa is located on the northeast of Nineveh province’s capital Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city with vast oil resources and strategic importance. Mosul is over 700 kilometers to the Turkish border.
The town of Bashiqa, situated at the heart of the Nineveh plain, used to constitute, with Bahzani, the third largest Yazidi settlement in Iraq prior to the massacre of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Sinjar (Shengal) in August 2014.
Thousands of Yazidis were killed in the massacre and thousands enslaved, as hundreds of thousands were displaced.
