A Yazidi youth named Kerîm Hecî Şero was killed yesterday in a Turkish drone strike in Sinjar (Şengal), Iraqi Kurdistan.
The 17-year-old was driving his car on a road on Mount Sinjar when a Turkish drone targeted him in the early afternoon. The vehicle was thrown into a ditch with the force of the bombardment, and immediately burned to a shell. Videos show fire brigades fighting the fire.
The young man’s body was taken from the hospital where an autopsy had been conducted, to his home in the village of Sinun (Sinûn) last night for religious rites. It was accompanied by a procession of cars to Sinjar cemetery for burial this morning.
Members of Sinjar Autonomous Democratic Council (MXDŞ) made short statements at the scene of the attack, accusing the Turkish state of ‘continuing the attacks that the Islamic State (ISIS) committed against the Yazidis’. They also condemned the Iraqi government’s silence over Turkish military assaults on Iraqi territory, denouncing it for “not fulfilling its responsibility to protect Iraq’s sovereignty”. Iraqi officials have yet to issue a statement on the incident.
Sinjar is the last remaining settlement of the original Yazidi homelands and is located in the north-west of Iraq. Turkish warplanes and drones have increasingly carried out airstrikes there since 2017, on a pretext of fighting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The specific targets are mainly facilities of Sinjar’s administrative body MXDŞ or the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBŞ) and Sinjar Women’s Units (YJŞ). Most of the fatalities are civilians and survivors of the Yazidi genocide of 2014 conducted by ISIS.
As recently as 24 and 25 October, six YBŞ fighters were killed and four others were injured in Turkish airstrikes. In addition to positions of the YBŞ, which was founded after the genocide against the Yazidi community, residential buildings, holy sites and water tanks belonging to the population have also been targeted and bombed.
