Turkey’s military says its warplanes have carried out airstrikes against what it says are Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq and in northeastern Syria.
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The central government in Baghdad also condemned the attack, calling it a “violation against Iraq’s sovereignty”.
The State Department and Pentagon both described the United States as “deeply concerned” by the strikes and said the objections were raised directly with the Turkish government.
The strikes appear to be the first Turkish air raids in Syria since Ankara completed an unprecedented military campaign there in March.
The Turkish Air Force has hit two Kurdish-held areas in Syria and Iraq, saying the bombardment targeted PKK “terrorists”.
The YPG released a statement saying its headquarters in Mount Karachok near the Syria-Turkey border was hit by Turkish planes, damaging a media center, radio broadcast facilities, and military installations.
YPG spokesman Redur Xelil said 20 YPG fighters were killed and 18 were wounded, three of them critically.
An AFP correspondent saw a bloodied stretcher and a wheelchair propped up on a building whose entrance was littered with rubble. He told Syria Direct that the “delegation” had expressed their “displeasure” about the attack and said they would “convey the reality of what happened to coalition leadership”.
The PYD published photographs of YPG officials walking alongside a man in a military uniform with a patch bearing a United States flag on his chest.
Turkey views the group as an extension of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, a Turkish insurgent group that has conducted a decades long insurgency that’s killed thousands.
“These strikes were not approved by the coalition to combat ISIS a href=”http://en.apa.az/tag/Syria-” *Syria and the country banned the Kurdistan workers ‘ party (PKK) in Northern Iraq”.
Turkish warplanes bombed sites in Jabal Sinjar along the Syrian border during the early hours of Tuesday, killing Peshmerga forces nearby.
“Turkey does not want Sinjar to become a shelter or a place where the PKK can hide and stock its ammunition and weapons like the Qandil Mountains”, Bayraktar said, adding that everybody should wait and see whether it was a one-time offensive or if the Turkish military will continue to target the PKK in Sinjar this summer.
In Iraq’s Sinjar, Turkey’s air force targeted positions of the YBS, a Yazidi affiliate of the PKK.
“These problems and tensions are all because of the PKK s presence”, it said, accusing the PKK and its affiliates of refusing to withdraw from the Sinjar area.
The file photo shows peshmerga fighters in Iraq.
The eastern side of the city was recaptured in January and a push on the western half launched the following month has made steady progress despite fierce resistance. The YPG and YBS are both fighting the terrorist group in northern Syria and Iraq.
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Moreover, Kurdish official Ilham Ahmad, the co-head of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDF), called on the worldwide coalition to condemn the Turkish aggression.
