The Iraqi president has announced that he will summon Turkiye’s ambassador and hand him a formal letter of protest over recent Turkish airstrikes on Iraqi territory.
The official protest came a day after an airstrike on a military airport in Arbat, southeast of the city of Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Three members of the region’s counterterrorism force died and three of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces were wounded, according to local officials.
“Day after day, systematic military attacks on Iraqi territory, specifically in (the Kurdish) region, are escalating without military or security justification,” Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid said in a statement.
The “aggression targeted innocent civilians and military and security headquarters”, he said. Rashid belongs to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party, which has its main seat of power in Sulaymaniyah. There was no immediate comment from Turkiye.
The targeted airport had recently undergone rehabilitation to facilitate the training of anti-terror units affiliated with the PUK, one of the two often-competing main parties in the region.
Bafel Talabani, the party’s leader, in an official statement on Monday labelled the alleged Turkish attack as part of a series of “conspiracies” aimed at jeopardizing Kurdistan’s security. He urged the federal government to “uphold its constitutional and national duties” in safeguarding Iraq’s territory and airspace, specifically in the Kurdish region.
US Ambassador to Iraq Alia Romanowski in a statement posted on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter) condemned the attack on the airport. “We reaffirm our support for respect of Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity — both are essential to Iraq’s stability and security,” she said.
Also on Monday, the Kurdistan National Congress, an umbrella organisation of Kurdish groups and parties, said in a statement that one of its members was killed inside the group’s office in Erbil.
